Tossed salad and scrambled eggs indeed

Nine years ago tonight after seeing Sondheim on Sondheim at Studio 54 (where I just saw an appallingly lackluster Kiss Me, Kate tonight), I found myself seated at a table next to Kelsey Grammar at an après-Sondheim dinner at noted celebrity-sighting restaurant Joe Allen. I’d heard Kelsey was kind of a dick, but he demonstrated on no uncertain terms how he’d earned that reputation when also-celebrities Tony Shalhoub and Kathy Baker made an appearance at the other end of the restaurant. Kelsey jumped up from his table and pushed his way toward the two of them while yelling their names and knocking my coat off the back of my chair as he stumbled by. He stopped in his tracks, looked back at my coat on the floor, did some quick cost-benefit calculations, decided taking two seconds to pick it up wasn’t worth the effort, shrugged, and continued on his quest to meet up with his socially valuable celebrity friends.

Dick.

Sniff Me, Coke!

I mean Kiss Me, Kate!

Sorry—I was having flashbacks to my Studio 54 days.

Shit. I forgot to take my long-traditional marquee selfie! I RUINED MY PROM.

But here’s a shot of my program framed by the beautiful Longacre Theatre proscenium:

Another performing adventure has ended at my beloved Paramount Theatre, and once again I stopped before I packed up and left to take a picture of this awesome door

It’s literally where a hole was cut high into the side of the gilded, lavishly baroque auditorium (specifically an alcove above the audience-left mezzanine) to link it to the austere new addition with all of its modern dressing rooms and bathrooms and showers and elevators and laundry facilities and its comfortably appointed green room with refrigerators and a wide third-floor window offering a southern view of downtown Cedar Rapids. I love how you can stand where I took this picture right next to a sleek stainless steel elevator surrounded by the clean walls and neutral carpet tiles of the modern addition and peer through this door and see the brilliant reds and golds of the rococo carpeting that hint at the breathtaking, venerable grandeur waiting just around the corner.

I grew up in awe of—and in love with—the Paramount Theatre, and I’m so thrilled and honored and humbled not only to get to perform on its century-old stage and enjoy the distinct privilege of looking out into the vast sea of lustrous golds and merlot velvets of its auditorium on a happily regular basis, but also to see first-hand the backstage additions and upgrades and enrichments to the expanded facility that will take it—as I see through the metaphor of this door—beautifully into its next century.

One last selfie with THAT VIEW before I abdicate the stage and ditch rehearsal and get home before my exploding headache becomes a major medical concern

I actually found an angle of the Paramount Theatre that I haven’t selfied!

Follies is finally moving into its gorgeous performance home and I’ve already celebrated by doing my little happy dance for being here.

Flashback Friday: What The Hell Is That Theater Called Edition

This was the view from my office in the Chicago Loop. In the 15 years I lived in Chicago, this venerable theater (which was called the Majestic when it was built in 1906) changed names from Shubert to LaSalle Bank to Bank of America to Private Bank, and since I left three years ago it's become the CIBC Theatre. Amid all those changes, it's been home to some amazing shows, many of which I went to see multiple times because it was right across the street from work. Jersey Boys and Book of Mormon sat there forever, 9 to 5 made a brief stop (where Dolly Parton herself walked right by me in the tiny lobby), and now Hamilton has taken up long-term residence. If you go see Hamilton or whatever comes next to its stage, look up to the fifth floor on the big squarish skyskraper across the street and wave. The next credit-card solicitation you receive in the mail might very well wave back at you from its colorful storyboard.

We have an emergency elf hat magnetic-clipped to our upstage-right flylines scaffolding

Do YOU have an emergency elf hat magnetic-clipped to YOUR upstage-right flylines scaffolding? No. No, you do NOT have an emergency elf hat magnetic-clipped to your upstage-right flylines scaffolding. We totally win.

Greetings from the bottom of The Terrifyingly Tall Spiral Staircase Of Gruesome But Festively Lit And Probably Involving Glitter Because It *IS* A Theater But It Will Still Be Splatty Death

The staircase—and everyone’s splatty, glittery death—starts on the skull-cracking concrete bowels of the theater and climbs almost two million (which we’ll round to just two for the purposes of this post) stories to the relatively safe safety of the stage-right darkness, where things can probably fall on us from the flylines but at least it’s not US falling on the skull-cracking concrete two million-give-or-take stories below us.

On the plus side, if we DO plummet to our splatty, glittery deaths tonight, we’ll crack our skulls to the peppy jazz stylings of Elf the Musical as it unfolds around us AS I’M RIGHT NOW TYPING THIS POST. So there’s that.

If a super-jazzy, super-jingly, super-challenging musical score about elves doesn't make your holidays brighter ...

if hearing a chorus of otherwise super-manly basses squeak out repeated high A's doesn't dog-whistle you ... if watching my freakishly talented friend D.J. totally ROCK IT as the charming, guileless, fearlessly ridiculous Buddy the Elf doesn't elicit even a wan smile from your stony comportment ... if your cold, dead heart prevents you from understanding my subtly nuanced performance of Doug the Christmas Cop breaking up a sweaty Santa fight ... you AT LEAST owe it to yourself to come see Elf the Musical just to hear the 90-year-old Barton organ fill Theatre Cedar Rapids with glorious Christmas carols before each Friday and Saturday performance.

The organ is a hidden gem in the heart of the city, and it is truly a treat to get to hear it on the occasions that it gets played. And just look at the organ console: IT'S BLACK VELVET! WITH RHINESTONES!

THERE. IS. NOTHING. GAYER.

Don't make me call you out as a cotton-headed ninny-muggins. Get your tickets at https://www.theatrecr.org/event/elf-the-musical/2018-11-16/

This, people—THIS!—is why you’re coming to see our last weekend of Fuddy Meers:

It's not because of our endlessly inventive fold-and-change set (though it IS pretty awesome). It's because of our almost-too-referential-to-be-in-good-taste house music (please register all complaints with someone else). It's not because of my Grammy-nominated, Canadian-trade-war-breaking, delicately nuanced portrayal of an honorable-but-faintly-flawed, unfairly stunning man who’s cruelly afflicted with alarmingly spiky hair and perhaps a mildly unsightly blemish or two (though thousands of ancestors of fallen Korean War soldiers are begging me from their graves to bring their children home based on the singularly stirring power of my comforting skin and my collective acting choices).

NO! None of that meaningless garbage is why you’re coming to see the last weekend of our show! Because THIS is why:

See these stairs? They go DOWN. To the BASEMENT. Of the THEATER. Where it’s NICE AND COOL. And these are just the actors’ stairs; yours have CARPET. And HAPPINESS. And OTHER CAPITALIZED THINGS.

And THEY’RE why you’re coming to see our show this unbearably hot Iowa weekend.

So get your hot, sweaty selves to our nice cool show NOW. You have only three more chances to see us before my Grammy nomination and my mildly unsightly blemishes are gone for good.

Sponge! Bob!

My Big Broadway Birthday Binge Bash Blowout concludes with a FRONT! ROW! CENTER! (of the balcony!) SEAT! for SpongeBob Squarepants, starring my relentlessly adorable next husband, Ethan Slater:

My final musical also featured a classy, respectful pre-show-selfie photobomb from my arch-nemesis name twin who really truly has the same name as me, and after years and years of chatting on Facebook we finally just met. And I really truly like him:

And here's the view of the gorgeously rococo Palace Theater awash in watery SpongeBob lighting right behind me as I sit in my FRONT! ROW! CENTER! (of the balcony!) SEAT!:

#HowToTurn50 #AndMaybeSeeAMusical #OrFour

Things I learned today in Manhattan:

• A ten-minute pedi-cab ride COSTS SEVENTY DOLLARS. That’s not a typo, and since the rates were carefully hidden up-front, there wasn’t a tip-o.

• It’s perfectly fine to look at the headshots in a Broadway program and then read the bios in the order of who’s cutest. Just as long as you don’t broadcast that you’re doing it on social media.
• It is all but impossible to walk a block in Manhattan without passing through a cloud of marijuana smoke.
• Also, Manhattan is so crowded that even if you’re completely certain that you’ve found a secluded spot in, say, a corner of a theater lobby to, say, quietly relieve yourself of a little gas, you’ll notice as soon as you’re done that someone had also ducked into that same corner to squat down behind you to tie his shoe.
• If you’re afraid to stop and crane your neck and look like a tourist, you’ll miss a lot of breathtaking architecture.
• We’re back in a golden age of Broadway belters who don’t need microphones to overpower an orchestra and throw you against the back wall on the money notes.
• Our hotel hallway is missing a set of gingham-clad twins asking Danny to come play with them.
• Seriously: I GOT SCAMMED INTO PAYING SEVENTY DOLLARS TODAY FOR A TEN-MINUTE PEDI-CAB RIDE.

#HowToTurn50 #AndBlithelyFartOnStrangers

ADDENDUM:

• There is nothing more valuable in life than a friend who understands you AND understands how to use Photoshop.

The Met is ... um ... a lot smaller than I’d pictured

Plus that stupid banner is blocking the storied coffee-splash chandeliers. But I’m glad I finally got to see the highlights of Lincoln Center. Except, of course, the damn chandeliers.

#HowToTurn50 #AndWearAShrugToTheMet

Happy 47th birthday to Follies

... the glorious, epic, mold-breaking 1971 musical by Stephen Sondheim, James Goldman, Harold Prince and Michael Bennett that ended up being too lavish and probably too jarringly mold-breaking for its own good. The most expensive Broadway production to date when it opened, it drew effusive critical praise but didn't get the musical-theater-pantheon foothold it deserved and closed after 500 performances without recouping any of its investments.

I was unfortunately three when it opened and I couldn't get tickets, but my heart and endless fascination and I were eventually--inevitably--pulled into its magical, inspiring, gorgeous, heartbreaking world when I saw the 1987 London revival, which gave Eartha Kitt a much-needed comeback when she replaced the broken-ankled Delores Gray (just like what happened to her in 42nd Street!) to belt the iconic "I'm Still Here"--which, as coincidences never cease, was the song in the 1971 production that brought Yvonne De Carlo back from the brink of terminal embarrassment after playing Lily Munster on TV.

Thankfully--inevitably--Follies has since then finally achieved the musical-theater-pantheon stature it deserves, and I've been fortunate enough to have seen more productions of it than I can count in New York, D.C., Chicago and beyond. I'm obviously overflowing with fanboy knowledge and trivia and opinions and lyrics (oh boy, am I overflowing with lyrics) about the show, but if I even want to come close to sharing everything about its brilliance that's waiting to burst out of me, I'll have to schedule a six-week subscription-series symposium at a local college to get it all Jakesplained to you.

Fun fact: It opened at the Winter Garden Theater in NYC, where--again with the coincidences--I just so happened to see my first-ever Broadway show (Cats, the fact of which I am hard-stop-sun-comes-up-coffee-cup unwilling to discuss).

Another performing adventure has ended at my beloved Paramount Theatre

And this time I stopped before I packed up and left to take a picture of this awesome door:

It’s literally where a hole was cut high into the side of the gilded, lavishly baroque auditorium (specifically an alcove above the audience-left mezzanine) to link it to the austere new addition with all of its modern dressing rooms and bathrooms and showers and elevators and laundry facilities and its comfortably appointed green room with refrigerators and a wide third-floor window offering a southern view of downtown Cedar Rapids. I love how you can stand where I took this picture right next to a sleek stainless steel elevator surrounded by the clean walls and neutral carpet tiles of the modern addition and peer through this door and see the brilliant reds and golds of the rococo carpeting that hint at the breathtaking, venerable grandeur waiting just around the corner.

I grew up in awe of—and in love with—the Paramount Theatre, and I’m so thrilled and honored and humbled not only to get to perform on its century-old stage and enjoy the distinct privilege of looking out into the vast sea of lustrous golds and merlot velvets of its auditorium on a happily regular basis, but also to see first-hand the backstage additions and upgrades and enrichments to the expanded facility that will take it—as I see through the metaphor of this door—beautifully into its next century.

One show name that's finally on the marquee, two chins

But it was home

The steep and very narrow staircase leading from the Theatre Cedar Rapids dressing rooms to stage left. Walking down them in tap shoes carrying an armload of costumes is a recipe for certain death. Mark my words.

Flashback Friday: Flood of Emotion Edition

Here's my beloved Theatre Cedar Rapids -- where I'm currently thrilled to be doing Billy Elliot -- drowning in Cedar Rapids' heartbreaking 2008 flood. The flood devastated the entire downtown, but now TCR has been restored to a gorgeously updated version of its original splendor with a huge new bar lounge, multiple rehearsal spaces, a second black-box theater, actor-friendly dressing and green rooms, and even stunning chandeliers in the auditorium that had been hidden away and lost to the ages.

You have two more opportunities to see our insanely wonderful show. Get your tickets at www.theatrecr.org.

Oh, what's the good of the strongest heart ...

It seems I've added another bipolar-med side effect to my collection: a stomachache/headache combo that leaves me practically doubled over in pain. And it must have stowed away in my carry-on because it's clearly followed me to NYC. It canceled our trip to the Whitney Biennial yesterday and saved me money on an expensive restaurant last night. Now it's canceled my second tap class and postponed a theater tour today. And it hurts so much I almost don't care. Which is exactly why my lucky understudy Bette is going on again for me tonight. And I'm curling up in a ball on the couch.