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MARIN MAZZIE
The striking versatility of Marin Mazzie, the three-time Tony nominee, has been on full display to New York theatregoers this past year.

In March the singing actress, who created the role of Clara in Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Passion, took part in the star-studded 80th birthday celebration of composer-lyricist Sondheim with the New York Philharmonic. Mazzie, in fact, was one of the select few women — joining Bernadette Peters, Patti LuPone, Donna Murphy and Elaine Stritch — chosen to be draped in red gowns as each performed Sondheim classics: Mazzie wrapped her rich soprano around the Follies heartbreaker "Losing My Mind."

A month later, the actress was seen in her first non-musical Broadway outing, playing corporate vice president Claudia Roe in the Rupert Goold-directed Enron, a London hit by Lucy Prebble that failed to repeat its success in New York. Although Mazzie says the run was "way too short," she says the experience was a "fantastic" one. "I loved every second of it. I truly believe in that play, and I think it is an amazing, amazing piece of theatre. I think Lucy Prebble wrote such a brilliant piece of theatre. And, Rupert Goold — how it was directed, it was so different and exciting and what it was dealing with was, obviously, so topical. I was thrilled to be a part of that, also, and it was a great, great cast. I just really thought it was an exciting piece of theatre that made people really think, and I'm just sorry it's not still there."

About the brevity of the run, Mazzie says, "It wasn't, unfortunately, given a chance to build an audience, and I do believe there is an audience really wanting it because the people that came to see it loved it, and still, when I'm seeing people at the stage door of Next to Normal, [they] still tell me how much they loved it."

And, now, Mazzie and husband Danieley are playing a couple struggling with mental illness in the aforementioned Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Next to Normal at the Booth Theatre. Mazzie and Danieley succeeded Tony winner Alice Ripley and Brian d'Arcy James, respectively, as Diana and Dan Goodman, in July.

	Mazzie in Next to Normal
	photo by Joan Marcus

Like her predecessor in the role, Mazzie is offering the performance of her career, a brilliantly layered and thrillingly sung turn that is utterly moving. Looking back, the actress says another recent role — Blanche DuBois in Barrington Stage Company's August 2009 production of the Tennessee Williams classic A Streetcar Named Desire — was a good warm-up for her current assignment. "I think of Blanche as sort of a Diana 50 years ago because there are various similarities," she says. "I believe that, probably, Blanche was bipolar, but [in that era they treated] mental illness [by putting] you in a hospital and [giving] you a lobotomy or [by giving] you ECT in a much more violent way than they do it now. Or people drank, which Blanche did, but they had some sort of traumatic experience that I believe triggered — or maybe a disease that was already there or they were predisposed to — but something dramatic and traumatic happened in their lives and brought that on . . . Now I'm looking back, that's how I'm looking at [the role of Blanche], but I didn't explore that [at the Barrington]."

Mazzie says that neither she nor her husband had seen Normal prior to the offer to join the Broadway production. "We loved it," Mazzie says of her and Danieley's first encounter with the musical drama. "We were so excited at the prospect of doing this meaty, emotional, compelling story and being able to play husband and wife on stage. We've always wanted to do a Broadway show together and haven't yet, so this was a great opportunity, and I'm so thrilled that [producer] David Stone decided to put us together in it."

[Read Playbill.com's recent Leading Men interview with Danieley, who speaks about his Next to Normal experience.]

Prior to beginning performances, Mazzie says she "did a lot of reading about mental illness just to try and understand it. It's really hard to understand unless, I think, you have mental illness. To really know what that darkness is that lives with you constantly, in your brain, every single day, and dealing with the drugs and the treatments and the episodes and all these things that people go through on a daily basis. I did want to read accounts of people who are living with the disorder so I could try and put some of that into Diana. But you know, when you start reading about people's accounts, everybody is different, and it manifests itself so differently in everybody. I think that's why it's something that is so hard to manage and figure out, because no one person has the same thing going on [as another]."

The acting couple had three weeks of rehearsal before they began performances; although the time to prepare was brief, Mazzie says "what we did have was [director] Michael Greif. We had Michael Greif for a good deal of our rehearsal time. Having us go in together, and then having Meghann Fahy — who took over from Jennifer Damiano — we basically had a new family going in. . . . No one ever was wanting us to, nor could we, be who our predecessors were. So we came in as a new family unit and working on it from our points of view and how we dealt with these characters and [how] we think about these people."