Seth's Broadway Diary, Volume 1: Part 2 (29 page)

Jeremy Webb is an Ithaca favorite because he did many Hangar Theater shows, including one where he was a suitor in the "Tom Dick and Harry" number in
Kiss Me, Kate
. The lady playing Bianca in that production was none other than Julia Murney in her first professional job!

Josh Henry closed the show with "Wheels of a Dream," and afterwards, all the performers decided to stay up late and eat/hang out. Josh and I were sort of full already since we had shoveled chocolate chip cookies (my fave) into our yaps before the show began, but it didn't stop us from shoveling more after the show. Then Andréa begged Josh to do what he does backstage during
In the Heights
, and we all went back to the room with the piano so he could demonstrate. Andréa explained that every night during the song "Home," she and Josh sit offstage and he sings a medley of Broadway songs while Mandy Gonzales and Chris Jackson sing onstage. Josh's mind is able to figure out what other Broadway songs can fit with the chord changes of "Home," and he changes it up every night. I sat down and played the piano, and while Andréa sang the main part, Josh was able to sing a countermelody including "I Have Dreamed," "Younger Than Springtime," "The Ladies Who Lunch," "The Life of the Party" from
The Wild Party
, "Patterns" and "The Story Goes On" from
Baby
and finish it off with "Being Alive"! Thankfully, I videotaped it and put it up on my website because Josh is brilliant, and the whole thing is amazing/hilarious!

Tuesday, I got back into town and hightailed it to another benefit. This time it was for The Hetrick-Martin Institute, which runs the Harvey Milk School, the NYC high school for Lesbian/Gay/Bisexual/Trans and Questioning Youth. I know the monikers sound like a headache, but there are many teens who are dealing with one of the those issues and drop out of school because of abuse they suffer at school or at home. I was there playing the piano for Cheyenne Jackson, who should sing at every benefit. He always sounds amazing, looks amazing and is hilarious. When he got onstage, he said, "Now, for those of you who don't know me, you probably looked in your program and when you saw the name Cheyenne Jackson, you expected a sassy little black girl. And to that I say… pretty much!" He then did an update on the Marcia Brady driving episode by saying that he was a little nervous before he went on, but he relaxed himself by picturing the audience in their Spanx. Tony Kushner delivered a great intro for Mary-Louise Parker, who was the honoree for the night. She said that she knew what it was like to be an outsider as a teen (she used to have Twinkies thrown at her), but she couldn't possibly understand what it was like for the children who have to come to the Harvey Milk School. She gestured to the table of kids from the school but got so choked up that she couldn't speak and, of course, everyone gave her a standing O. If they had a school like that when I was growing up, maybe I wouldn't have had so much unexpressed fear/sadness that came out in crazy ways, AKA crying for two hours after seeing
Flipper
. My mother was like, "What the-? It's just a dolphin!"

Tim Gunn from
Project Runway
was the host, and I cautiously approached him backstage and asked for a photo. He was so kind and I told him I was a big fan. When I said that I was gonna run the photo in my
Playbill
column, he recognized me and said that
he
was a big fan! I still got it! I begged him for a tip on where I should buy clothes and he recommended Club Monaco. I knew I wouldn't be using that info until I got a tip on how to actually have money to buy clothes and, though I scoured the mostly gay/lesbian audience, Suze Orman was nowhere to be found. However, a hilarious drag performer named Bianca Del Rio
was
at our table. Bianca was there to do the auctionand I complimented her enormous sprayed/wrapped hairdo. She was hilarious and said, "I've always gone for the natural look… for a corpse.
"
He wound up winning Season Six of "RuPaul’s Drag Race"!

The worst part was the dinner. Not the food… quite the contrary. I got there and sat down and was psyched that the appetizer on my plate was a delicious shrimp cocktail. I was even more psyched when I saw that the person next to me wasn't showing up. Yes! I quickly ate their shrimp cocktail… and then they showed up. There was a plateful of empty shrimp shells, and I started panicking. Thankfully, only two people in their party arrived, and there were three empty seats, so I didn't have to use the excuse I quickly made up indicting Bianca.

Wednesday was a big day because Sirius and XM Radio officially merged. I used to only be on Sirius, but now I'm on both the Sirius
and
the XM Broadway channel. I'm still doing my radio interviews every Wednesday, and I recently had Nick Spangler and Margaret Ann Florence, who play Matt and Luisa in
The Fantasticks
. When I used to be a sub pianist for the show, it was at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, but now the show has moved to the Snapple Theater. The only problem with the theatre is that it's on top of a restaurant that sometimes gets smoky, and around every two weeks, an incredibly loud fire alarm goes off inside the theatre
during the show
! Unfortunately, it's always during the "Soon It's Gonna Rain" scene, i.e., the most romantic and quietest section of the show. It happened the night I saw it and I was alternately loving the sweet scene being played onstage and trying to remember the correct order of verbs in "Stop, Drop and Roll."

Nick is currently on TV's
The Amazing Race
with his sister and I asked him what filming it was like. He said that he didn't want the other contestants to know that he was an actor because he thought that they'd assume he was always putting on a façade, so he told people that he was going into his father's business as a funeral director. Unfortunately, unbeknownst to him, right after he told everybody, they went to an airport computer station and Googled him, which led right to his acting website. For the rest of the trip, he kept up the façade that he was in the funeral business, not knowing that they were keeping up the façade that they believed him. His version of not wanting to appear deceitful set him up to look ten times more deceitful.

Then I interviewed Constantine Maroulis from
Rock of Ages
and I, as usual, lamented the fact that he lost
American Idol
. Turns out, he wanted to sing a sassy song on the show for "’90s week," but they couldn't get the rights to the song for TV. So he was stuck with a headache-y one instead. Shockingly, that was the week he was voted off. He said that he loved doing
The Wedding Singer
on Broadway and, for some reason, keeps getting cast in ‘80s musicals. I offered the theory that probably his fabulous rock voice appealed to the producers plus the fact that they wouldn't have to pay for a lace-front wig.

Saturday night, we had "family fun night" and James, Juli and I watched
The Bad News Bears
. I never saw it back in the ‘70s, and let me just say that PG then is not like PG now. Those kids were cursing up a
storm
. When Juli asked what it meant when Tatum O'Neal said that some other kid had balls, I said it was a crazy ‘70s expression. She does not need to know any anatomical parts that are not on her own body!

This week, I spent a lot of days working on the Rosie O'Donnell variety show, and it looks like it's gonna be fun
.
And/or cancelled after one episode
.
Rosie has always loved the
Urinetown
Officer Lockstock sketches that appear during Gypsy of the Year, so she asked me, Eric Kornfeld and Hunter Foster to write some about her new show. Rosie said that we should bust her as much as possible, and we went to work. They were filmed last week with Jen Cody taking a break from
Shrek
to do her hilarious take on Little Sally, and the promos are up on Rosie's website (
Rosie.com
). This is my favorite thing I wrote:

LITTLE SALLY: Who's the host of this new variety show, Officer Lockstock?

OFFICER LOCKSTOCK: Rosie O'Donnell. Are you a fan?

LITTLE SALLY: Well, I liked her in "Misery."


OFFICER LOCKSTOCK: That was Kathy Bates, Little Sally.

LITTLE SALLY: I didn't mean the movie, Officer Lockstock, I meant the year she spent on
The View
.

OK, people, we're about an hour from L.A. Remember when I did
Broadway 101
last year and a cool lady from a production company hired me to write a sitcom about my childhood? Well, I finally finished the script, and we have our first network pitch on Tuesday! I've never pitched a sitcom before and I'm preparing myself for a sea of blank faces and significant flop sweat. I'm gonna go right from possibly tanking to taking the red eye home so I'm back for the SiriusXM show. I'm sure Orfeh and Laura Benanti will love being interviewed by a baggy-eyed, exhausted sleepwalker. Peace out!

On Pitch

November 24, 2008

This week began in sunny L.A. I was there to do my first sitcom pitch to a network, but I also got to see some friends. I stayed with Jack Plotnick, who's been one of my best friends since 1991! I met him because he went to Carnegie Mellon with many of my friends (Michael McElroy, Billy Porter, Natalie Venetia Belcon), and he called me to coach him for his
Pageant
audition. That was a brilliant show that featured men dressed as women doing a beauty pageant. The contestants were: Miss Texas, Miss Deep South, Miss Great Plains, Miss Bible Belt, Miss West Coast and Miss Industrial Northeast. It was one of the funniest shows I've ever worked on. Each contestant modeled an evening gown, had a talent and had to sell a product made by Glamouresse, the fake company that sponsored the pageant. I'm still obsessed with Miss Bible Belt's spiel.
Do you have an enlarged pore? Cleft, pit, or indentation in your skin? (She sassily/accusingly points at someone in the audience.) Ordinary make-up won't cover that up. That's why you need… Glamouresse's "Smooth-as-marble facial spackle."
She then demonstrated by taking out a section of dry wall and slathering spackle on it.

Jack and I had a great time and met up with our friend, Kali Rocha, who
also
went to Carnegie Mellon. Kali and I worked together on Broadway in
An Inspector Call
s and then she took over the Katie Finneran role in
Noises Off
. You probably know her as the annoying stewardess who makes Ben Stiller wait to board the plane in
Meet the Parents
. Right now she plays Dr. Sydney Heron, the perpetually peppy doctor, on
Grey's Anatomy
. She and I are the kind of friends that constantly repeat stupid jokes we made 15 years ago. Once we were eating at Josie's, which is a sort of health food restaurant on the Upper West Side, and for dessert they had non-dairy ice cream. The brand of the ice cream was "Mattus," and when I asked Kali what flavor she wanted, she shrugged and said, "It doesn't Mattus." That happened in '96, but we literally hauled out that headache-y chestnut last week in L.A. It wasn't funny the first time and it's not funny now, but we love it.

On the day of the pitch meeting, I went to Kali's house (and hung out with her adorable baby, Barlow) and she drove me to meet Amy, my writing partner. I've never done a pitch before, so I have nothing to compare it to, but Amy thinks that it went well. I got the network exec to laugh numerous times, especially when I was describing my arch-nemesis honors English teacher. (She once yelled at me, in front of the class, "They warned me not to put you in this class!" to which I retorted back, blank-faced, "Well, now you've learned your lesson.") After we pitched it, we sent the exec the pilot episode, so I guess we'll know soon whether he loved or hated it. It was a really fun experience to do, so either way, it doesn't Mattus
.
I’m glad it didn’t Mattus, because the network passed!

I flew Virgin Atlantic home and, though I praised the flight out there, I must dish the return flight. It was a red-eye and when we asked for blankets, we were told that they ran out! Pretty much every person on a red eye wants to sleep, so how could they not have enough and run out? It's like going to a Patti LuPone concert and having her run out of belting. I arrived home and dragged myself to my SiriusXM
Live on Broadway
show. Laura Benanti was my main guest and was hi-larious. She felt she had to describe to the listening audience what it looked like in The Times Square Information Center where we do the interview. We're essentially in this big, cavernous room, and she talked about how on one side, there are people lined up buying tickets from the Broadway concierge, and on the other side, people are checking their email. She then held up several pamphlets available in various kiosks (including one for the Circle Line) and pointed out that, in the center of the room, we have a row of chairs filled with our audience. "But," she said, "instead of all those images, I want the listening audience to imagine me sitting on a beautiful velvet throne. I'm wearing a long, bejeweled gown… and so is Seth." And there it ended.