|
|
 |
 |
OF 'ANNIE' A THREE-PART SERIES |
|
PART THREE: THE ROLE THEY WON'T FORGET In the final chapter from Nachman's detailed look at an American musical theater classic, Broadway's original "ANNIE" talks about her ongoing search for another role to break the chains that "ANNIE" has draped over her career since that show closed.
|
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.co;m
In her post-“Annie”
teens, Andrea McArdle did everything from singing with Liberace
to touring with Bob Hope, Carol Channing, John Davidson and opening
for Shecky Greene and others. In Liberace’s show, she did
a 15-minute act--a Barry Manilow medley, some show tunes, “Over
the Rainbow” with Liberace at the piano. “Tomorrow”
with Sandy her co-star mutt from “Annie,” and closed
the segment belting “New York, New York” surrounded
by The Rockettes.
She laughs, “Man, do I have some stories!” McArdle
vividly recalls parties at Liberace’s house in Vegas, hanging
out with Liberace’s 20-year-old lover, Scott Thorson, who
also became her playmate, only five years older than she was.
“I was lucky to have someone younger in the show to be
with. He was Liberace’s ‘chauffeur,’ quote-unquote.
He drove the cars on stage for Liberace in his Vegas act. Liberace
picked Thorson up on Sunset Boulevard. He was turning tricks.
He had no chance--his mother ran a brothel in Hollywood. Scott
had no mother figure so my mother became like his mother. It
was very sad. I was 15 then, mind you, and I’d watch him
drinking vodka, with bags of Quaaludes. I’m lucky I didn’t
get killed. It was all fun and exciting, but I was a good girl,
you know? I was in a Catholic girls’ school in Philadelphia.”
The Liberace parties were like “some sort of hallucination,”
she remembers. “A week before I’m writing a report
on the JFK conspiracy and now suddenly here I am standing in
Liberace’s guest house with my mother, the Rockettes, Charo,
Tony Orlando, Wayne Newton, Siegfried & Roy, and David Copperfield--all
walking into his house! You feel you’re in a time warp out
of ‘The Flintstones.’ But it was so much fun! It never
got ugly, ever. I just had a taste of it. I wasn’t let out
on my own.”
She got a further taste of the celebrity life when, at 18, she
was in a revue at New York’s St Regis Hotel and lived there
six months. “They gave us a three bedroom suite, free
room service, dry cleaning, everything carte blanche for six
months. Your show is 45 minutes long and Studio 54 is three blocks
away. I did that for a year and it got real tired.”
Liberace’s manager wanted her to go on an extensive tour,
but her father nixed it. As he tells it, “His manager
said, ‘Mr. Liberace would certainly appreciate it,’
and I said, ‘Well, I’m sure he would, but Andrea’s
got to get back to school. I am not impressed by celebrities.
Liberace was a very nice man but that had nothing to do with
it.”
McArdle finished school and was planning to go to NYU when “Jerry’s
Girls” came along. She toured in it at 19 in 1984, her first
big stage role after “Annie,” and easily held her own
alongside Carol Channing and Leslie Uggams. Despite the opportunity
for “All About Eve”-like backstage tensions--pretty
young girl upstages aging established female stars--the trio
got on fine. “We had a ball,” she says. “It
was a small tour and Channing was lovely to me.” Andrea
complained to Channing that she didn’t want to be saddled
forever with “Tomorrow.” “I wanted to be cool
and I dissed ‘Tomorrow’” with her pals, but
the canny Channing told her to thank God for a signature number:
“Leslie is still waiting for a song like that. What do
they play when Leslie walks out on the Tony awards?”
Wherever McArdle appears, sooner or later she must sing “Tomorrow.”
Says Tom Meehan, who wrote the dialogue for Broadway's "Annie,"--“To
have to sing ‘Tomorrow’ over and over again must be
like some kind of curse on her head. It’s a little burden
but she does it with a smile. She’s always up.”
At a 2008 tribute to the show's composer, Charles Strouse, in
San Francisco, McArdle sang “Tomorrow,” with Strouse
at the piano, belting it out as if for the first time. (Her favorite
version of the song is Cissy Houston’s, inspiring her to
find a gospel arrangement for herself.)
At 24, McArdle married Ed Kalehoff, a wildly successful TV theme
song composer 16 years her senior--“a legend in his business,”
she calls him. At 18 he wrote the theme for “The Price Is
Right” and went on to compose opening and closing music
for “Monday Night Football,” “The Match Game,”
“ABC’s World News Tonight,” “Wide World of
Sports,” “Concentration,” “Match Game,”
“Family Feud,” and other Mark Goodson game shows, picking
up a check whenever his theme is played (five days a week on
game shows); she and her husband flew around in Goodson’s
private plane.
So, McArdle clearly hasn’t had to work for a living, like
your average scuffling Broadway diva. The couple lived in New
Rochelle and until recently kept a New York apartment in Chelsea
(“Alexis (her daughter) grew up there until she
was four, petting the bums on 23rd Street, so I thought it would
be nice to get out into the `burbs a little bit”); Kalehoff
owns a 46-foot sailboat, sailed to Cancun and back, and the couple
summered at Martha’s Vineyard. Even so, McArdle, the well-to-do
New Rochelle matron, hustles for jobs like a newcomer in town.
“Annie” or no “Annie,” she has to fight for
every role.
Apart from “Annie,” her Broadway timing has always
been off--still too young for roles she might have snagged in
major musicals of the `70s and `80s like “Crazy for You,”
“Grand Hotel,” “City of Angels,” “Will
Rogers Follies,” “Into the Woods,” “Sunday
in the Park with George,” etc. Broadway was changing just
when McArdle was poised for a second hit. “The sad thing
is, when I was hot the theater was not. It was the `80s, the
beginning of the British invasion and revival after revival after
revival. I had so many offers to do cabaret then, but if you
did cabaret you were compartmentalized.”
She goes on, “They weren’t doing star vehicles in
the `80s, which was a big mistake, because now they don’t
have another generation of stars. There’s nobody but Bernadette
(Peters) and Patti (Lupone).” It was also, she notes,
the end of solo producers like David Merrick and Harold Prince.
After playing the Judy Garland role on tour in “Meet Me
in St. Louis,” she didn’t get to star in it on Broadway
(someone named Donna Kane did), because some South African producers
mounted the Broadway version. “I think they made a big
mistake,” she says. “Ours was a terrific production.
Something about me scared the South African people. I was more
than perfect for it. I don’t know what they didn’t
like.”
Her identifiable voice sounds much as it did at 14 because of
sinus problems she’s never had fixed for fear of losing
her unique vocal quality. “That’s why I sound like
I do. I landed in Lenox Hill Hospital because of it. My pediatrician
was Sean Lennon’s and one day John Lennon came over to me
and said, ‘You can’t sing like this.’ He had vocal
cords that had him spitting up blood with the Beatles. I’ve
been to three voice coaches and they all told me, ‘Oh, my
God, that’s all wrong!’ So I just don’t go back.
Even when I’ll not be able to speak I can still sing; I
don’t know how that works. I just have vocal cords of steel.”
McArdle’s throat specialist in New York was the doctor who
operated on Julie Andrews, after which Andrews stopped singing.
“This guy is doctor to the stars. You go into his office
and find people like Madonna and Jon Bon Jovi. There were very
few people who stayed with him [after the Andrews surgery],
but I was one. I’m a loyal person that way. I go to him
when I have a big job.”
Any vocal damage McArdle has is because of her brassy Broadway
belt. “The belters are the lazy girls,” she
jokes in her act, “sopranos work harder.” She
had singing coaches as a child but mainly worked by instinct.
“My problem is, I can’t read music, I can’t
do scales. I didn’t take piano until I was 40, just to see
if I had any chops. But I have such an incredible ear. I think
when you learn how to sing by looking at notes it’s not
connected to your heart the way it is if you just go by ear and
feel.” Despite her famed belt, she says, “I
like restraint and color. You have to contain the sound. You
don’t need to knock `em out with everything just because
you can. Instead of always doing something huge, I’ll do
something tiny, something simple, a throwaway like ‘I’ll
Get By.’”
McArdle has an oldies soul. “I love all that old stuff
I grew up with”--singers like Joni James (“such
a sexy voice”), Peggy Lee and Karen Carpenter, to whom
she does a tribute in her act. “Hers was the one voice
that made me want to sing. She had no vocal affectation whatever,
just an extension of the speaking voice. To me, that’s what
singing is, especially in musical theater. I hate in a show when
someone suddenly goes from speaking into th-i-i-i-i-s”
[mimics an exaggerated trill].
In her cabaret act, she performs a unique sultry, slowed-down
version of Sondheim’s “You Could Drive a Person Crazy”
(using a Martin Charnin arrangement). “It allows me to
show off a bit more vocal texture, a richer tone than people
are used to from me. I want to show that I have more than a Broadway
belt.” Watching her act, you get the idea that she is
still auditioning for every available role.
So McArdle soldiers on at 45, filling in here, touring there,
doing cabaret shows and two CDs--a Christmas collection and “Andrea
McArdle on Broadway”--standards with a pop sound produced
by her husband that fails to display her in-the-flesh zing. She
craves an orchestra to support her big voice: “I want
a big band, the Nelson Riddle kind of thing. That’s what
I was born to sing. It’s a shame I can’t find it.”
She also laments being too late for the lavish Manhattan hotel
showroom era--the Empire Rooms and Persian Rooms. “There
are no great supper clubs in New York with great bands. Why don’t
they have places like the Latin Casino and the Copacabana?”
She ran into another dead-end at casinos. “I did a huge
Christmas show at the Tropicana in Atlantic City with a cast
of 80. It was a fabulous show but my crowd doesn’t drink
or gamble so we were not desirable to them. A lot of people who
came to see our show brought their kids, not good for the casino.”
She calls Atlantic City showrooms a wasteland of “has-beens
and bad bands.”
McArdle is afflicted with another Irish disease--a fast-talking,
wisecracking gift of gab--articulate, witty, ironic, outspoken,
self-deprecating. Charnin wrote some clever specialty numbers
for her club act to suit that persona--“Annie Has Breasts,”
announcing her maturity, and a revised “Broadway Baby”
in which this real life Broadway baby candidly confesses she
needs a new show.
Her cabaret act runs the gamut from Garland chestnuts (“Zing
Went the Strings of My Heart,” “Over the Rainbow”)
to songs from her own vast past (“NYC,” “I Dreamed
a Dream”). The critic Chad Jones wrote that McArdle is “at
ease with the crowd and herself, far from a has-been former kid
star,” with “vitality to spare. If she’s
been through the wars--and she really has--she sure doesn’t
look it.”
Despite her battle scars and brave talk, a note of frustration
creeps into her conversation about a thwarted Broadway career,
awaiting a second “Annie.” She’s clearly hurt
that none of the original “Annie” creative team has
ever called her to audition for anything else. “They
seem so averse to casting me even though I helped send their
kids to college and bought their houses in Westport.”
She adds, “In 30 years, Mike Nichols, Martin Charnin,
Tom Meehan, and Charles Strouse have never given me a paying
job. I go up to the Vineyard and hang out with these people,
so we’re social--but not one thing.” She did do
a backer’s audition for Strouse’s show “Applause,”
but that’s it. “There are so many things about my
career that were like, ‘Why isn’t Andrea here?’”
She sounds more bewildered than bitter and remains, she says,
“on great terms with them all, but I still think in their
heads I’m only that girl. I think they can’t see me
in anything else because I’m so indelible to them in that
way. And vocally I haven’t changed enough or become so different
or become an old lady. I think I have that thing about me that’s
ageless.”
Tom Meehan echoes Charnin: “It’s very strange. Whenever
I’m working on shows, I’m always thinking, ‘Could
Andrea fit into this anywhere?’ I just wish she could get
a real solid Broadway part that fit her where she could bring
down the house again with that voice. She just needs that second
show. It just hasn’t come along. Patti LuPone had ‘Evita”
and lots of other things.”
McArdle responds, “I do believe Tom and Martin (Charnin,
the director) mean it, but Charles [Strouse] is the odd man
out. He’s the one who most upset me. I don’t understand
it, because I’m the one who made his melody [“Tomorrow”]
famous--I’m the one they associate it with. I can’t
quite get that. Maybe he just can’t see me as anything else
but that --who knows? There could have been loads of things.
Years ago, my God, I could have done the Ann-Margret [movie]
role in ‘Bye Bye Birdie.’ He had me do the backers’
audition for “Applause’ and they gave it to Stefanie
Powers or somebody. I thought, Wow, that really hurt. It was
a real kick in the teeth.” She pauses. “I made
them all very rich men.”
She adds, “With Tom [Meehan], there are many things he’s
done. I don’t know why they didn’t have me in the Megan
Mullally role in ‘Young Frankenstein.’ All right, she’s
a TV star now, so you use Megan Mullally, but then Megan Mullally
leaves and - hell-o? Not that I want to replace Megan Mullally
in a really ill-conceived role. But at least ask me -- and then
I’ll say no.”
While she hasn’t exactly been imprisoned by “Annie,”
she says, “‘Annie’ has been detrimental to
me, but I’m through analyzing it. I do think that if you’re
not careful you can perpetuate the whole little girl thing. People
want you to stay there”--it’s the classic Shirley
Temple Syndrome. People she meets casually who learn who she
was are blown away. “Everyone has some sort of connection
with the show or knew somebody who was in it. It’s as if
I’d been one of ‘The Brady Bunch.’” When
she strode onstage at the Charles Strouse tribute in San Francisco
last summer, there was an almost audible gasp at her sassy yes-it’s-me!
femme fatale persona. Leapin’ lizards! Kids are cute
at that age, too.
Meehan comments, “I thought she would be big in the movies.
It never happened for her in TV either, where it happened for
Sarah Jessica Parker [Strouse’s discovery] and for
Catherine Zeta-Jones” [an orphan in the London “Annie”].
He adds, “The star career didn’t happen but I still
hope she can find a part on Broadway and come back.”
At 39, McArdle had a midlife crisis and re-examined her career
aims. “I was ticked off that it was actually hitting
me like it hits everyone else--I thought I was special or different.
I took two years off. I said I don’t know if I want to keep
doing this. It was like a nervous breakdown but it wasn’t--I’m
not a depressed person. I was just disgusted with the state of
television and with casting all these TV stars in Broadway shows.”
She resisted anti-depressants. “There’s no way in
hell I would ever do anything like that. How can you act? What
do you have to say if everything is nice? It just numbs you out.”
McArdle sang her way out of her midlife crisis and now believes
she’s more than ready for mature woman roles like, well,
Momma Rose in “Gypsy,” which she actually played in
Houston in 2004, and yearns to do again with her daughter as
Gypsy Rose Lee. “I thought I could go away and hide and
do ‘Gypsy,’ which felt more right than many roles I’ve
done. It wasn’t a great production but I had to do it, because
my Broadway career really stalled.” In passing, she
comments, “I thought the Sam Mendes revival of ‘Gypsy’
with Bernadette Peters was so terrible. It wasn’t Bernadette.
I like Bernadette even when she’s miscast and she was totally
miscast.
People may feel I’m miscast in ‘Gypsy’ but I feel
I’m much more right. Vocally and texture-wise and everything,
I think I’m the perfect Momma Rose. I’m now the age
the real Momma Rose was. It’s a blessing in some ways to
look younger [closer to 35 than 45] but also a curse.
So I’m cutting my hair and trying to make me look older.”
She pleads, laughing, “Please cast me as somebody’s
mother already!”
McArdle is ready for all the big maternal musical roles--not
just Momma Rose but Mrs. Lovett, Dolly, Mame, you name it. “I
always look through Backstage and call my agents and say,
‘Why wasn’t I submitted for that?’” To
stay visible, and because she wilts offstage, she has done countless
summer stock shows, many of them, she says, “better than
a lot of Broadway productions.” She hoped to be cast
in musical versions of either “The First Wives Club,”
in the Diane Keaton part, or “9 to 5,” but it didn’t
happen.
McArdle has done most of the major diva roles in regional theaters,
from Peter Pan to Eva Peron, after which lyricist Tim Rice told
her she was the best Evita he’d ever seen in America. “I’m
like a younger American version of Elaine Page” (London’s
original Evita). McArdle would seem to have been an ideal Roxy
Hart in “Chicago,” one of the few major musical roles
McArdle hasn’t played in her travels as Queen of the Road--from
Luisa in “The Fantasticks” to Nancy in “Oliver,”
from Sandy in “Grease” to another Annie (Oakley) in
“Annie Get Your Gun,” from sizzling Smoking Car Ashley
in “Starlight Express” to sensitive Margie in “State
Fair.” She has an astonishing range for the supposedly typecast
original Annie.
She says, “I just don’t want to replace anybody
else in a Broadway role.” It rankles her that, when
she has replaced someone on Broadway, it’s often a TV star
who has replaced the original star for box office reasons, a
trend perpetuated by producers Barry and Fran Weissler--“the
weasels” she calls them. “How dare they get a TV
star to do it and then have someone like me replace her! Let
us [Broadway actors] do it first and then let the TV stars
come in and make a load of money.”
McArdle has done enough by now to afford to be choosy: “I
won’t do a lot of summer stages. They’ll pay you a
chunk of change but the production is awful.” A prime
example was a 1995 production of “State Fair” that
McArdle toured in, with John Davidson and Kathryn Crosby, one
more Interesting Thing That Didn’t Happen. It got to Broadway
but closed quickly. “‘State Fair’ was the most
frustrating show I’ve ever done, but I got to sing ‘It
Might as Well Be Spring’ so that was good. It could have
been a real gem but it was so old and tired, and they did the
same thing they do with other shows--they went into the Rodgers
& Hammerstein catalogue and added [outside] numbers.”
She remarks, “Davidson was a liability. They were paying
John Davidson five times what they were paying us, like 20 grand
a week. My thought was: nobody was in it to make a killing, so
let’s all have a hit! Wouldn’t we all rather look great?
Put the money into the show! I’ll take a lot less money
if I’m going to grow and have a great experience. I’d
rather have something I’m really proud of then walk away
and buy a new outfit at Bloomingdale’s.”
Seth Rudetsky, her cabaret accompanist, says, “Coming
back in ‘State Fair’ was not a great idea--it was a
role that wasn’t suited to her voice and didn’t really
show her off.” Her most vivid memory on that tour was
the day she borrowed Kathryn Crosby’s lip liner. “She
told me to go to a doctor and have my lips done. She said, ‘My
God, your lips are just not happening!’ I didn’t care
for her at all. She thought I was her daughter Mary, but I wasn’t
about to be her punching bag.”
McArdle, like many an impatient performer waiting for the phone
to ring, finally put together a cabaret show she could control.
In 1986, she did her first solo act at Freddy’s, which drew
raves. “Bob Hope saw it, so I went from playing to 75
people at Freddy’s to 6000-seaters. Then I realized my act
was too intelligent [for a general audience]. So I had
to put back in my cheesy Atlantic City stuff. But I was just
not into that. I am an honest performer, I will say that, honest
to a fault.”
Cabaret is an ego-and resume-enhancing but often money-losing
proposition, less a career builder than a billboard. As Andrea’s
father notes, “Musicians get paid, the club gets paid
and makes money, but with what the clubs are willing to pay it’s
not enough even to cover [performers’] expenses.
As much as you want to work and let people know you’re working,
you can’t afford to keep doing that. More than anything,
she wants to work so sometimes she’ll do things that gets
her work but economically not worth it.”
McArdle says, “I lost money on the Metropolitan Room
gig last year but I needed a review in New York. I needed to
let people know that I’m back and I want something to be
in that I’m proud of. This last cabaret show was a way to
show people a very different side. I really want to do more Kander
& Ebb stuff. I want more saucy material. But the audience
I’m reaching doing cabaret is so tiny, it’s like nobody.”
Even so, she expects to do more cabaret. “I want to find
that audience--my audience. They’re definitely out there.”
The title of her recent act, “You Don’t Know Me,”
was a pointed memo to casting directors and audiences. As she
told an interviewer, “People should know I’ve moved
on and so should they.”
In her sharp, savvy act, McArdle squarely faces her “Annie”
dilemma both in “Annie Has Breasts” and backstage stories
about the show. In Charnin’s rewritten “Broadway Baby,”
she cries, “I need a show!” - and sings that she’s
even willing to play a female Shrek; she takes a sly dig at Patti
LuPone in a reference to “one-octave singers.”
(In one edition of the satirical revue “Forbidden Broadway,”
her plight was parodied by a grownup Annie singing, “I’m
30 years old…Tomorrow,” as she begs for a sequel.)
Despite her fabled past and bulging resume, finding work remains
a scramble. For the past five years she’s been stalled at
another awkward `tween age: “I’m not 50 and I’m
not 30, and when they cast for a 45-year-old mom they don’t
think I fit the mold.” She recently read for a musical
called “Monsters,” about a 40-year-old woman who awakes
to confront her demons. “The more I do of that kind of
stuff will change their minds.” She hoped to take over
“Mamma Mia!” on Broadway, despite her fervent wish
to avoid the replacement rut.
If McArdle has a specialty, it’s gutsy dames. “I’ve
had my moments when I’ve done the Eva Perons, the Fantines,
the Nancys [in ‘Oliver!’], all these incredible
characters. I have the chops. I’ve always thought of myself
way more as a character actress than a leading lady. I think
I have at least one Norma Mae in me. Through the years I realize
I am an actress and I have the capacity to be a really great
actress. The acting thing was almost uncomfortable at first because
I was playing people who were like me, but lately I’ve played
people who are very different. That’s such a liberating
thing. If you do it right, [you’re so high] you can’t
even drive yourself home. I know what that’s like and it’s
better than any drug I could ever choose.”
Glancing back,
Martin Charnin says of “Annie” and its dynamic star:
“The ghost of Andrea McArdle haunts this show forever”--just
as it haunts her. He comments, “Pragmatically, she’s
blessed--she owns the part, she has a signature, an identity,
she’s iconic. Ninety percent of the performers on Broadway
would kill for that.”
On the other hand, he adds, “The audience has to overcome
their single image of what a performer like Andrea can do, to
experience her versatility. Andrea was a tough kid but she had
to go through a desert, from 14 to 21. When you return at 21
you have to have other skills, but Andrea just wants to sing.
And the minute you hear three notes of her voice you’re
able to identify her, something most people in this industry
don’t have. When Andrea opens her mouth, you never have
to ask, ‘Who is that?’”
Charnin goes on, “Maybe she hasn’t found a new role
because the theater has changed, times change, material changes.
All of these retreads have never been able to eliminate the comparisons.
Even when Patti LuPone does ‘Gypsy,’ wonderful as she
may be, you’re still, somewhere in the back of your head,
or in the fourth paragraph of somebody’s review, saying:
(Ethel) Merman did it first and best.”
He adds, “So in every instance you see Andrea recreating
another Broadway ghost. If she’s in ‘Annie Get Your
Gun’ she’s gonna be compared to Merman, she goes into
‘Cabaret’ she’s gonna be compared to Liza. So
the problem is not Andrea. The problem is that the creative voices
today haven’t sat down and said, ‘OK, let’s make
a musical for grownup Andrea.’ That’s the only way
she’s ever going to break the shackles of Annie’--when
someone finds a role where she’s Andrea today, not Andrea
yesterday.” McArdle’s dad is more sanguine about
it all: “It’s maybe a once in a lifetime thing,
to get something like ‘Annie’ that takes off like that.
She’d love to have that again. Who wouldn’t?”
McArdle’s dilemma goes beyond her and is symptomatic of
what has befallen Broadway musicals, which no longer build shows
around stars. There are few marquee musical names since many
of them fled the stage for the screen or Las Vegas (Streisand,
Andrews, Minnelli), and only a handful have evolved besides the
ubiquitous Peters and LuPone. Sutton Foster perhaps (“Thoroughly
Modern Millie,” “Drowsy Chaperone,” “Young
Frankenstein”), but Foster is mainly a New York draw, ditto
Kristen Chenoweth, Audra McDonald, Donna Murphy, Christine Ebersole
and Rebecca Luker.
Star vehicles fueled Broadway for decades and could keep a mediocre
musical running a year; audiences went to see Mary Martin, Ethel
Merman, Joel Grey, Gwen Verdon, Angela Lansbury and Robert Morse
no matter what they were in. Today’s audiences go to see
certified hits, special effects, or to gawk at movie, TV, or
pop stars in the flesh. Broadway musicals no longer grow their
own stars. The show itself must do the heavy lifting that stage
giants once did, and contemporary songwriters just aren’t
up to the task anymore. Without great stars and songs, all that’s
left is smoke and mirrors.
While many people in theater can’t dislodge “Annie”
from their brain, Charnin says he’s not among them. “I’ve
been looking for 25 years for something, an original role that
would encompass the qualities Andrea now possesses as a grownup.
I’ve never had the opportunity to find another character
that marries her specialty to who she is today. Directors and
writers want to make her something she’s not. Not a grownup
Annie, but they want her to have qualities not necessarily organically
hers.”
McArdle’s father faults her recent managers. “She’s
not had a good manager. I see some of the talent on TV and I
say, You really can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
What you need is management, but after my experience with managers
I am not a big fan of managers at all. Maybe some are good, but
I haven’t found one. My experience with managers is all
bad. They’re mostly interested in themselves - they think
they’re the talent. Entertainers are very vulnerable people
who are not much for paper work or contracts or IRSA forms and
that kind of stuff, so they need support like that. But the last
two managers she had -- I’m glad I wasn’t within arm’s
reach. They were low, despicable people, and that’s all
I’ll say. She was ready to sign a contract if I hadn’t
seen it first and raised hell.” He’s often acted
as her manager.
Rudetsky, a musicals maven, is equally puzzled by McArdle’s
stymied Broadway career but notes that even established stars
like LuPone and Betty Buckley rarely get a new Broadway role.
“Andrea really should be a Broadway star, but producers
are not interested any more in stars--they want to cast people
they don’t have to pay a lot of money to. Does anyone know
the star of ‘Phantom?’ The thing about being a Broadway
star is having a unique voice. A lot of singers are big belters
or great sopranos, but having a unique voice like Patti, Betty,
and Carol [Channing] is what makes a star, which is what Andrea
has. Her voice has that almost huskiness.”
Even so, he notes, “Andrea is the least bitter person
I know. I’m much more bitter! She’s really good-natured.
She’s got a great sense of humor. She just loves theater,
she loves people. When she did ‘Beauty and the Beast’
her dressing room was always open, people were always visiting
- she’s just the opposite of most Broadway stars, isolated
from the company. She’s not one of those celebrities who
don’t talk to the little people. She’s like a real
theater broad, with great war stories like Elaine Stritch. A
lot of women are very competitive with other women in this business
and she’s not.” But he concedes, “She is
a little scattered, like me, very A.D.D. - ‘Oh, my God,
where’s my music?’ -- but she’s great to everybody.”
McArdle is such a compulsive performer (“I would do it
for no money -- it’s sad but true”) that she once
told an interviewer “When I’m not performing my
body goes insane from not being on stage. I want the rush. I’m
just that way. When I’m on the phone at home I walk a quarter
of a mile. I cannot sit still for three minutes. Sitting through
‘Les Miz’ is something I aspire to do some day. I can
do the show eight times a week but I cannot sit through ‘Les
Miserables.’ No way!” She recalls as a kid doing
four things at once - “I used to color and lift weights
and eat and watch TV all at the same time, but I could never
do just one of those things. I’m still like that.”
Rudetsky further surmises about her plight: “She may
not audition well, that can make a big difference.”
McArdle admits, “I don’t audition well - I’m
horrible. Every time I get a show, people have seen me and said,
‘I want to work with her.’ So I have the job before
I even get in the room. It’s never what I do in a room;
I’ve never excited anybody in an audition. Part of it may
be that when I was a kid it was a fun thing to audition and now
it’s a horrible thing - because now it’s how you get
your work.”
Rudetsky points out: “It’s just very unfortunate,
but there are a lot of extremely talented people not working
on Broadway. Talent is not all you need. Andrea hasn’t done
that much in New York. As good as she was in ‘Beauty and
the Beast’ it’s not really a mark of how talented she
is. I don’t know if any important people in New York know
how talented Andrea is. The right people haven’t seen her.
And they need to hear that she can also sing sweetly. People
are always shocked when they hear her sing and see how gorgeous
she is. They can’t believe it. She could’ve done ‘Gypsy’
or ‘Mamma Mia!’ or ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ on
Broadway. ‘Les Miz’ should have shown everyone. It’s
one of those mysteries and it’s very frustrating. She’s
gotta become visible where people will see her and go, ‘Oh,
my God!’ People now just say, ‘Oh, she’s that
girl from ‘Annie.’”
©2009 by Gerald Nachman. The photo of Andrea McArdle is courtesy of Broadway World. This column first posted June 29, 2009.
TO ACCESS GERALD NACHMAN'S ARCHIVE OF COLUMNS
ON THIS SITE, CLICK HERE: NACHMAN
ARCHIVE.
You can comment
on this column online. Please address your message to either
"The Editors" or Gerald Nachman. To send an email,
click here and don't forget to mention Gerald's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|