A Little Bit Wicked (14 page)

The show was actually done by Paramount, but Garth Ancier,
who was the current God-of-all-whatever at NBC, liked me and loved our pilot episode, so NBC bought it right up front and ordered thirteen episodes. Jon Tenney signed on to play my boss, Tommy Ballantine, a jaded but basically good-hearted real estate developer. Larry Romano was his faithful sidekick (a contractor or something), Aldo Bonnadonna. The forever leggy Ana Ortiz played Santa, the vampy sales rep. Dale Godboldo lent the cast some cool as Tyrique, a hip bicycle messenger. I was Kristin Yancey, an aspiring singer/dancer working as Tommy’s secretary. In addition to the music we’d been workshopping for
Thoroughly Modern Millie,
Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlon had written “The Girl in 14G”—a crazy great song, one of my favorites to do in concert—and I asked if they could write a theme song for the show. I loved what they came up with:

No red light can stop me. Hold on to who you are.

That’s what I’m about, right there.

The show was fun, fun, fun. John had a great eye for inspired physical-comedy bits that used my petite stature without making me feel like a clown. The first episode opens on a dance audition; first, the camera pans across the line of dancing feet, then it pans up and back across the dancers’ hopeful faces, but of course, all you can see of me is a little
Who down in Whoville
ponytail bobbing between shoulders. I had the opportunity to sing—and I mean really sing—in several episodes. (When was the last time you heard Mozart’s Queen of the Night aria on a sitcom?) The wardrobe had sort of a 1940s flair, which suited both me and Ana beautifully. There are some fabulous pumps on that show, let me tell you. Ana looked amazing in her pencil skirts, and someone made me the cutest charcoal peplum jacket with red piping.

John Markus did the scripts, which were a step up from the usual set-up-joke, set-up-joke, set-up-joke, commercial. The comedy was more about character than situation. And the dialogue—well, let me give you a little taste from a scene in which Kristin Yancey is at a planning meeting for a church fund-raiser:

Every table reading felt like a birthday party. On Monday, we’d get the script and gather to go over it. We spent the week putting each scene on its feet, preparing to shoot on Friday. I was like a greedy little sparrow snarfing up all these seeds of wisdom and expertise and
knowledge—everyone from my costars to the prop kids knew what he or she was doing and patiently brought me up to speed. When I saw the finished episodes, my character visibly changed as the weeks went by. And it wasn’t just the hair extensions. As I became more at home in the process, the lines were less labored, the bits flowed back and forth between the actors, rhythm and melody started coming together. The premise was still intact, but it had grown past a one-note joke. (Kristin Yancey summed it up in one episode when she glared at Santa: “Get used to it, ’cause I’m gonna keep on being good
right in your face.
”) The first few episodes were chemistry experiments, as they are with any series, but by the thirteenth episode, we’d found the added dimension in each of the people and were building the dynamics and relationships that become the real lifeblood of a show.

We were to have a March airdate—midseason replacement—and we were excited about that. In the spring, the failed shows go off the air and the wannabes get their shot while plenty of people are watching. But as our opportunity approached, Garth Ancier left the network (or it left him), and the incoming president, Jeff Zucker, saw things differently.

“I don’t think they’re going to air the show,” John told me as gently as possible. He’d gotten to be like my big brother. “He says they have a lot of respect for you as a performer. It’s the show they hate.”

“But…but…why?”

“One of the big complaints is that no such girl exists.”

We had a good laugh about that because the show had drawn so much material from my real life. The broad strokes—being a Christian in a business that’s largely jaded, being small in a world that’s largely large—and lots of little details, too. In one episode Tommy and Aldo come to Kristin’s place for Hum Dum Ditty. In another, Kristin’s high school boyfriend, Brett Breedlove, shows up from Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. John Markus used almost word for word a conversation in which he and I argued about the ethics of making dinner reservations
at both Moomba and Balthasar. (He wanted to keep his options open; I thought it wasn’t right to hold an extra table, which keeps some nice person from dinner and screws the waiter out of a tip.) People kept telling me not to take it personally, but a thousand small things made this show extremely personal for me, from the Hum Dum Ditty to the name on the door.

Without going into the minutiae of contract law, John explained to me that sometimes it’s necessary for the network to “burn a show off” by airing it in such a way that no one notices when it’s on or cares when it disappears.
Kristin
was dumped into the midsummer replacement landfill during the months when the fewest viewers are watching television. The advertising campaign consisted of exactly one thirty-second ad. But because the show was aired at eight thirty on a Tuesday night, right before
Frasier,
the numbers didn’t actually suck. I felt a surge of foolish hope. The following week,
Kristin
was shown in a different time slot, and the numbers fell. The time slot was changed again the following week. Not even my parents knew when it was going to be on. The angel of sitcom death was swift and unmerciful. After a total of six episodes,
Kristin
was replaced with a new reality show called
Fear Factor,
in which people were going to do stunts and eat bugs or something.

“Ugh,”
I huffed. “Like
that’s
ever going to make it?” More famous last words.

So that’s what happened to my show. The boob-tube equivalent of winning talent and being second runner-up. It’s a mercy, I suppose, that we didn’t anticipate any of this while we were shooting, so we were all high-spirited and hopeful when we said good-bye and broke for hiatus. The last line of the last episode was “Get your hand off my ass.”

Epitaph for a flameout.

Obviously, Jeff Zucker is a genius at what he does. This is a tough business in which tough decisions have to be made, and he has the
balls to make them. You can’t fault the guy for that. Three years later, I joined the cast of
The West Wing,
and at the up-fronts, he came over and introduced himself to me.

“Hey,” I said. “Thanks for canceling my show, ya party pooper.”

He laughed, gave me a hug, and said, “I’m so glad to have you back on our network.”

I hugged him back. No hard feelings. Really. I love that Jeff Zucker.

I’m baking him a nice batch of my special cookies.

Because I’ve always been a happy person by nature, I wasn’t prepared for the depression that settled on me that summer. Something inside me felt mummified, afraid to feel, and when I did allow myself to care about anything, I had a deep foreboding sense that no matter how hard I tried, it was just going to fall to crap anyway. Thinking about my personal life made me feel worthless. Thinking about my professional life made me want to hit myself in the head with a hammer.
Thoroughly Modern Millie
created a lot of buzz, with people saying it was sure to win the Tony for best musical (which it did) and that Sutton Foster would nail it and walk off with a Tony herself (did and did). It’s not like me to look back and question my decisions, but now I was overwhelmed with the feeling I’d made a terrible mistake doing this television show, which made me wonder about every decision, all the could haves and might haves. I’d always seen the opportunity to learn, laugh, and make a great story out of it when circumstances went awry. Now all I could see was the opportunity to fall in a hole.

Maybe it was all too good to be true, I figured. Maybe I hadn’t paid my dues enough or clawed my way up enough. Maybe I was going to have to do that now. During pilot season, I auditioned for a show called
Seven Roses
with Brenda Blethyn. I’d always wanted to work with her; she’s one of those actresses who is so kind, so smart,
and so Mozart-talented, anything she does is going to be a great experience for the people around her. But I have to admit, it tweaked my nose out of joint that I was having to test for it. I’d won a Tony, had my own show, and now I was back on the cattle wagon auditioning? In the midst of my
Bullets Over Broadway
moment, as I was heading in the studio door, I saw Patty Duke heading out.
What on earth?
I wondered.
Why is she here?
I rarely pipe up and introduce myself to people because I don’t want to bother them; I’ve been shy about that since I was a kid. I’d rather admire people like that from afar. But I had to know…

I went over and introduced myself and told her I’d been a big fan since I could remember, then without even trying to couch it in casual form, I said, “Ms. Duke, I’m dying to know—what are you doing here?”

“Oh, I had a great opportunity to test for this new show,” she said, those famously vivacious eyes bright with excitement. As she was happily telling me all about it, a production assistant called my name. Ms. Duke reached over and squeezed my hand and with her signature girlish giggle said, “Good luck, sweetie!”

I went in, and it went well. They called two hours later to tell me I got it. A few days later I saw that someone else had gotten the role Patty Duke had auditioned for, and it made me feel sick inside.

“You can have an Oscar and it doesn’t mean jack,” I bitterly told Erin Dilly on the phone. “You can be Patty Duke—a
legend
. They should be offering to cut off a thumb to get her on their show. But no. That’s the capricious, soul-consuming business we’re in.”

“Oh, for pity’s sake. What is
wrong
with you? This isn’t you, Kristin.”

When the summer was over and it was time to go back to New York, Erin decided that I should come straight from the airport to her place on the upper west side of Central Park.

“Spend the night with me,” she said. “We’ll have girls’ night and sleep in till noon.”

I was grateful to have a break before facing my empty apartment. We stayed up late talking, but the sound of sirens in the street woke us up long before noon.

“Welcome to New York,” I grumbled, pulling a pillow over my head, but the sirens kept wailing, and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I got up and turned on the TV. A vast blue sky was boxed in the small screen. Smoke billowed up from the familiar skyline.

The first tower fell, and I said to Erin, “What movie is this?”

“Oh…God…” Her voice was choked and frightened. “It’s really happening.”

Still wearing the boxers and T-shirts we’d slept in, we jammed shoes on our feet, grabbed our cell phones, and ran. Down the stairs. Out into the street. Into chaos. Into Armageddon.

I’m not going to tell “My 9/11 Story” because my 9/11 story is a pale inconvenience compared to what so many others went through. I will say that it was wrenching to see Broadway sitting dark and silent.

Over the following months, my little heartbreak about my little television show came into a very different perspective. Instead of dwelling on how it got snuffed, I made the conscious decision to gather all the good things about it and hold those under my nose like a bouquet of marigolds for the rest of my life. Every table reading where we laughed until our sides ached, every zingy line that hit the mark, every good soul in this excellent team of talented people, my peplum jacket with red piping, cherry tomatoes and doughnut holes from craft service, tap dancing on a table, singing Mozart over spaghetti, smiling at pictures of the cameraman’s grandbaby. I did what Ellen and I sang about in that They Might Be Giants song; I built a little birdhouse in my soul.

I haven’t heard from John Markus in a long time, and that makes me sad.

“Maybe he feels bad,” a friend suggested recently. “Because he got you on this bus and it went over a cliff.”

But I love that bus. I’m proud of that bus. In my heart, it’s not a flop, and I will never talk it down or apologize for what it didn’t become. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience and, in retrospect, an oasis. A completely sweet kiss before the lights went out.

A huge hit. Grandbaby-picture-smile huge. I wish you could have seen it.

D
enny’s cat is seriously grating on me.

Now, please don’t go blogging about what a cat hater I am. I promise I love all God’s creatures like a Care Bear loves high-fructose corn syrup, but Sally is a malcontented wheezer, a shoe-chewer, a three-hundred-pound ball of contempt and shedding who hisses and spits like a python every time I walk by.

Denny has moved in, camping out while builders finish his condo on the other side of the river in Jersey, and while Denny and I get along like peas in a pod, Maddie and Sally are—well, they’re like cats and dogs. Sally seems to be carrying some hair-borne toxin. The moment she enters the room, my skin starts to itch, and I can’t breathe. I’m convinced I’ve developed an allergy, and so has Maddie, who’s been sneezing and having bad dreams.

Sally gets on my bed, staring daggers at me.

“No, kitty!” I scold. “Off the bed.”

“Mrrraaaw,”
the cat says disdainfully.

The cat is not invited on my bed. Only Maddie is invited on my bed. And Mom. And on rare occasions, Mr. Writer (though I sometimes have a little trouble breathing when he’s around, too). The cat glares at me. Her eyes glow with loathing. I find myself surreptitiously opening the window six inches or so.

“Here, kitty kitty kitty…”

Okay, excuse me, but I have to step in here.

Denny? Nobody asked you. You stay out of this.

Something you need to know about Sally…

Shut up, Denny.

That is Kristin’s cat.

Okay, technically, that is true. I will admit that. But Denny, the cat doesn’t like me. The cat doesn’t
want
to belong to me. The cat wants to belong to you.

When Kristi was doing
Babes in Arms
at a theater in Minneapolis, her dance partner thought it would be sweet to give her this little kitten. Sally was the name of her character in the show, so they named it Sally. She came home with it, and I was like, “A cat? Does this man know you at all? You can’t take care of a cat. You’re never here. You’re way too busy, and—no. This is ridiculous. No cat.” But she loved this little kitten and couldn’t give it up, so I ended up taking care of it for her whenever she was out of town. She brought Sally with her when she was living at my place in L.A., and when she went back to New York to do
Wicked,
she got Maddie, and that was it. She wanted nothing further to do with the cat.

Good-bye, Denny! Thanks for playing. We have some lovely parting gifts for you.

Excuse me while I close the window.

All right. Fine. Sally did start out being my cat, but things change, and if there’s one thing you learn in the theatre, it’s how to roll with the changes.

Things were different after I returned to New York. New York was different. The world was different. Broadway was hard hit emotionally and financially by 9/11; it took a while to recover our joie de vivre. I shuttled back and forth to L.A. over the next year or so, singing concerts, doing my Miss Noodle thing on
Sesame Street
and
Elmo’s World,
and making brief appearances on
Frasier
and a few other shows. Denny and I did major road trippage, driving from Houston to L.A., eating at Sonic, stopping in Vegas for a spa weekend. I spent three months in beautiful Toronto, shooting
The Music Man
with Matthew Broderick for ABC. But I kept my home base in New York because I was workshopping a show that I knew was going to turn the world on its ear.

Gregory Maguire’s bestselling novel
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
was a witty perspective flip on L. Frank Baum’s
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
and a small aspect of his
just suppose
story was that Elphaba (an homage to the original author—her name is drawn from his initials) and Galinda (who evolves into Glinda) were roommates in college. This makes me wonder about Maguire’s college roommate, but it made Stephen Schwartz wonder what would happen if that story was translated to the stage. (He did the music for
Godspell,
so you can see how he and I are soul mates.) He brought in Winnie Holzman, who’s written for some great shows, including
My So-Called Life,
which you gotta love (the Emmys did). They took the idea to another dimension, creating the script and transformative music and lyrics. Like a cosmic game of Telephone, the story evolved as it was passed along.

At the heart of Maguire’s novel is the idea that layers of good and bad exist in everyone, and those layers are most effectively excavated by love. At the first reading of
Wicked,
the script was mostly about the love affair of Elphaba and Fiyero with Madame Morrible as the antagonist in the mix. When Stephanie J. Block and I brought voices to Elphaba and Galinda, yet another dynamic emerged. The two of us
had only one scene together, but it really popped. Six months later, at another reading, another Galinda and Elphaba scene had been added, and it popped, too. I sat there thinking,
Am I crazy, or is this really about the two witches?
Apparently, Winnie’s crazy, too.

Now, let me say here, I’d have done the show even if the Galinda role had remained small. I love a mighty little spicy-tuna-hand-roll of a role. (One of my favorites was the eager poet Fern, who becomes Annette Bening’s lover in
Running with Scissors
. A total of four minutes on the screen, but what a plum!) Winnie’s language is delicious, and Galinda’s lines were like tasty little bonbons—enough great moments to make it juicy, plus the song “Popular,” which was the one all the little girls were going to be singing. I knew that the first time I heard it. But something more was there. Everybody knew a Galinda in high school. (She’s the one who was so happy, it made you want to beat her up in the girls’ bathroom, right?) Everything was easy for her. She floated around as if her life were a magic bubble. But when we grow up, we learn that no bubble remains unscuttled in this world. So what happened to that girl? Who did she become?

Stephanie and I reached deeper into the characters, and the story evolved to focus on the relationship between the two witches. This is Elphaba’s story, but parts of it we need to see through the eyes of her friend. It’s the transformation of Galinda the Giddy to Glinda the Good that makes Elphaba’s journey a victory instead of a defeat. Glinda takes the story into the future after Elphaba melts away, and that’s how Elphaba truly defies gravity.

During three years of workshops, the great script got even better. The terrific music took flight. This was something very special, and everyone involved knew it.

Nearing the out-of-town tryouts, making our way toward Broadway, I was offered an extremely meaty roll on
The West Wing,
which had premiered the year before to great critical acclaim and was now a huge commercial success. I was thrilled that my name even came up
in that conversation. It was an amazing opportunity. A serious acting role. The producers of
Wicked,
Marc Platt and David Stone, have a good-cop/bad-cop thing going. You don’t know from day to day which is which, but that’s the well-tuned team they are. They’d gotten me into this at the beginning and were not about to let me walk away now, but truthfully, they didn’t have to work too hard at it—partly because I loved working with them. There was not one scrap of doubt in my mind;
Wicked
had the legs to get to Broadway and was going to be a hit. And along the way, the Galinda role had evolved into a substantial challenge. She belts, she sings legit, she dances, she girl-fights, she’s funny, she’s poignant, the character matures emotionally and vocally over the arc of the show—oh, honey. You couldn’t have gotten me out of that magic bubble with a crowbar.

Stephen had had me in mind for Galinda from the beginning, but before we started out-of-town performances, auditions were held to cast the role of Elphaba, and I was asked to sit in. Of course, I was pulling for Stephanie; she’s a good friend, and I’d loved working on the show with her, but all five women being considered were terrific. Any of them would have brought something different and exciting to the production. Producers and our director, Joe Mantello, decided on Idina Menzel, an amazing performer who’d blown everyone’s socks off in
Rent
. I was excited about working with her. (Stephanie played Elphaba in the national tour, in a later Broadway company, and in Chicago’s long-running production, and she rocked it.) Norbert Leo Butz was cast as Fiyero and Robert Morse as the wizard.

The out-of-town shows weren’t exactly charmed. Some of the reviews weren’t stellar. Anxiety was high at times. In one spectacular meltdown, the powers that be all stormed out, and just to break the silence that fell, I grabbed Idina and dipped her for a big kiss. Everybody left on the stage fell out laughing, then Idina cracked us up again by saying, “The scary part is, I enjoyed it.” During our final rehearsal in San Francisco, a light tree crashed down on my head and conked
me out cold. That evening, while I was in my hotel room nursing my battered noggin, I got a panicked call from the lobby.

“We’ve got a problem,” said Winnie.

My first thought was
Noooo. I need to sleep.
My second thought was
Oh, crap. Am I getting fired?
I went downstairs to find Winnie and Stephen pacing and exchanging notes. Long story short, several of Galinda’s lines hadn’t originated in Maguire’s novel (to which they had rights) or Baum’s original book (which had passed into the public domain); they played off the movie, which is so ingrained in the collective conscious, it makes for great laughs. It had begun to sink in that this show was going to get seen by a whole lot of people, including the lawyers for Warner Bros., who owned the rights to every word in that movie. We were going to have to cut, tweak, or improvise around stuff like
lions and tigers and
[you know what]
oh my!
and somehow make the new lines play as well as the movie send-ups.

I did what I always do when I’m trying to think: I went power-shopping. I know what that sounds like, but I find shopping meditative. One minute I’m stroking the seam of a perfect pair of pants in Olive & Bette’s, the next moment, I’m having an epiphany about that Judy Garland song from 1942. (Not the one you’re thinking; the one nobody does.) In New York, I’m supported in my endeavor by dear friends: Barney, Mrs. Fields, Filene, and Ben and Jerry. Out of town, I have to hit the mall. Being a shopper savant is not about spending money; it’s about making choices and finding what fits. That’s the process, the circle of life, the story of the glory of shopping.

The next morning, I found Winnie with her feet up.

“I’m exhausted,” she groaned, and I said, “Of course you are!”

She’d never written a musical before. That’s a man’s world statistically, but she’d busted down the door and done something truly inspired. I have tremendous respect for her, and I can’t wait to see what she does next. Stephen had decided the night before that changing even one word of any questionable line protected the production from
legal snares and actually made the script funnier because it caught the audience off guard. They expect the little dog to be named Toto, so saying “Dodo” tugs the rug out from under their feet a little. Lesson learned: it’s dangerous to be SuperGlued to anything in any show. (Or in life.) You have to let go of what’s not working no matter how dearly you wish it would work; put that ol’ thinking cap on and step up to the next thing. The changes played great. Unfortunately, during the show that night, I was playing the heck out of my hair-flipping bit and herniated two disks in my neck.

The show underwent major changes between San Francisco and New York. Joel Grey was brought in to replace Robert Morse. An entire number—“Which Way Is the Party?”—was scrapped and replaced with “Dancing Through Life.” Because of my neck injury, my costume had to be retooled to include a neck brace, which we Galindafied with the Bedazzler. We rolled with the changes.

Wicked
officially opened at the George Gershwin Theater on October 30, 2003. It went on to smash box-office records set by
The Producers,
then went on to smash the records set by itself. While 80 percent of Broadway shows never earn back the money that’s been invested, and a solidly successful show takes two or three years to break even,
Wicked
was in the black—or in the green, I guess—after only fourteen months.

Richard Zoglin wrote in
Time,
“If every musical had a brain, a heart, and the courage of
Wicked,
Broadway really would be a magical place.”

Tweedly-deet-dee-dee, two ladies…

Dang, there it is again!

When you first meet Joel Grey, all you can think of is
Cabaret
. Then you get to know him, and you discover this deep-river soul and dear, dear heart. He’s one of those old-school pros—part of a dying
breed, I’m afraid—show people who are all about the work. There’s an unspoken bargain among the players—we’re in this together in the hokiest “C’mon, kids, let’s put on a show!” kind of way—and it feels wonderful. Standing next to Joel onstage, you can feel how happy he is to be there. Swept along by this completely boyish joy, you’re willing to try anything and everything and then try something else, make a fool of yourself, look less than pretty. Heck, I’d have let the man whip a stick out of my mouth!

Carole Shelley was right there with him. She shares that same brand of professionalism that rules out any fear of failure. I loved working with her and learned a lot by watching her. This was not her first rodeo, as they say, but she still cracked herself up and took everyone with her. Onstage, she was a powerball, but in her dressing room she was gracious and quiet, serving tea and scones in her silk robe and wig cap between matinee and evening performances, telling me stories about a different time when theatre was a life and not a job. Once I fell asleep on her sofa and woke up when a little mouse ran across my face.