By Seth Rudetsky
12 Nov 2007
Right now she's the standby for Rosie Perez in The Ritz, and in the spring she'll open on Broadway in In the Heights. The last time she covered a role was when she was the Belle understudy in Beauty and the Beast, and she prides herself on not being one of the many utensils in the ensemble but "the" broom. There was only one, and she was it. The devastating story is that she was asked to play Belle for ten performances so Kerry Butler could go on vacation. Her whole family came up from Florida, but she didn't want them to see her first show, so they all bought tickets for the following night. During "Be Our Guest" her heel got caught in one of the tracks on the stage that are used to bring scenery on and off. She fell and knew that something was wrong with her foot. She found out later that she broke it! She got up but didn't know how she was going to finish the number. Suddenly, her hands were grabbed by Lumiere, so he could spin her around. The late, great Patrick Quinn was playing Lumiere, and Andrea started whispering to him, "Don't spin me! I hurt myself!" Unfortunately, he couldn't hear her and assumed she was telling him how excited she was that she was on, so he gave her an extra-vigorous spin! Yay! I'm sure the children loved seeing Belle being spun while her face registered blinding pain. Later on, Patrick was mortified, and he and Andrea always laughed about it. After she was put down, she staggered to the center of the stage to start the signature "Be Our Guest" kick line. Could she do it? She thought, "Well, I am the lead in this number, right in the center. It would sorta make sense if everyone kicks but me." But the trouper in her came out, and she did the full can-can high kicks with a broken foot. She got offstage and within two seconds her wig and costume was pulled off and she was rushed to the ER. Her mother had decided to come after all because "I'm not going to have my daughter playing a lead on Broadway while I'm at dinner!" No one knew where her mom was sitting in the audience, so an assistant stage manager was sent to the audience to watch for the woman who jumped up after the "The role of Belle will no longer be played by Andrea Burns" announcement was made. The other headache was that Andrea was getting married in a few weeks. She healed well enough to be able to walk down the aisle without her cast…very carefully. After the wedding, Vicki Clark (who had no idea about the foot) told her, "That was the best walking down the aisle I've seen. I've never seen someone comfortable enough to just take their time."
Andrea's gotten great reviews for her CD, and I think the break -out song is gonna be "BTW, Write Back" by In the Heights composer/star Lin-Manuel Miranda. It's about a devoted musical theatre fan who keeps writing to the myspace page of her favorite Broadway star. AKA, me at age 12 if myspace and/or the internet existed back then. Or, quite frankly, computers.
At Andrea's show I ran into Ted Sperling, who's getting ready to music direct the Lincoln Center revival of South Pacific. I am always devastated to see revivals because usually they shrink the orchestra, and it sounds like a synthesizer face-off. But he told me the revival is gonna have the same instruments as the original production in the 1940's! Brava! Speaking of running into people, I also saw Legally Blonde director Jerry Mitchell on Broadway and 51st street right after my show. He said he's in the middle of filming the new Bravo TV dance series "Step It Up" It sounds like another version of "So You Think You Can Dance," which I love. I asked Jerry if he's one of the nice or mean judges, and he said he wouldn't be a judge. Instead he's the Tim Gunn of the show! He's hosting it with Elizabeth Berkley from "Showgirls." I have so many jokes I could make now, I'm going to leave them to your imagination…suffice it to say, they could include any and all of the following: a lap dance, a pre-meditated fall down the stairs and Joe Eszterhas's hairstyle.
Friday I did an interview with Legally Blonde's Kate Shindle for a bunch of theatregoers from the Carolinas. Kate talked about being crowned Miss America 1998 and how she caused an uproar by wearing boy's shorts in the swimsuit category. The only uproar I caused by wearing shorts as a swimsuit was because of the love handles sitting brazenly above said shorts. I asked her about the beginning of the pageant when all 50 girls are onstage, and it's suddenly whittled down to 15. I assumed that the girls know who's being ixnayed, and she said that they don't know until that moment. Unfortunately, the losing girls have to come back throughout the pageant and perform back-up, and Kate said we should watch closely because there are always a couple of girls missing 'cause they're too traumatized/raccoon-eyed to continue. The cool thing about her winning is that Kate's platform was AIDS education, and she toured all over the country talking about it. She said she would visit schools in the Midwest and Deep South where they would normally never discuss such things, but because she was Miss America, they would let her come to the school and educate the kids.
Oh, yeah, I finally got my video blogs working again (go to my website to see), and if I could deal with being on the phone with Mac and going to the store to have it looked at by the computer "geniuses" who work there (that's literally what they're called), then the Broadway folk can all come to an agreement. When I come back next, I want to hear that they kissed and made up. Producers and Local One: Start making out! So go to my website for some new ones and hopefully, by the time this column comes back, Broadway will be back to business!
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| Kevin Chamberlin and Jerry Stiller chat after a Ritz performance.
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