By Andrew Gans
08 Dec 2006
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| Kathie Lee Gifford |
News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert/cabaret stage.
KATHIE LEE GIFFORD
"I'm stunned that I'm even performing again," singer-actress-composer Kathie Lee Gifford said by phone last week from her home in Connecticut. "I thought [that] was really a closed chapter in my life only because I'm loving the writing [of musicals] so much." Gifford has, however, opened that chapter, if only briefly, for a limited engagement as the child-hating, scheming Miss Hannigan in the Manhattan stop of the tour of the Tony-winning musical Annie, now playing a limited engagement at The Theater at Madison Square Garden through Dec. 30.
Annie lyricist Martin Charnin, who is also the director of the current production, had asked Gifford to play Hannigan for a previous incarnation of Annie a decade earlier. "That was the second time I turned down a wonderful opportunity," Gifford explains, "because my daughter was little. The other time was when Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards had asked me to do Victor/Victoria. I remember telling Julie, 'Julie, you know what, my daughter is one year old, and she will never be that [age] again, and I can't believe I'm saying no to Mary Poppins!' But she was so great, which is not surprising. She said, 'Kathie, I had to make those same choices when my kids were little. You'll never, ever be sorry that you put them first.'"
Now, a decade later, Gifford has agreed to step into the shoes of Miss Hannigan, the role created on Broadway to Tony-winning effect by Dorothy Loudon and later played on the silver screen by Carol Burnett and on the small screen by Kathy Bates. "Could you ask for bigger footsteps to have to step into? It just makes my neck hurt to think about it!," Gifford laughs. "But what I realized before stepping into Putting It Together" — Gifford played Tuesday nights in that Sondheim revue, allowing Carol Burnett an additional night of rest — "is that you just can't think about the role that way. You have to try to bring something unique and different to it. Miss Hannigan has been done a thousand times, so I just want to try and bring my particular neurotic bent to her, and hopefully the audiences will enjoy it."
Gifford says that a friend recently asked her, "Aren't you sick to death of people singing, 'The sun'll come out tomorrow. . . '?" "You know what," Gifford confesses, "[I am sick of] the wrong people singing it, absolutely, but when a little 11-year-old girl who is an orphan in 1933 sings it with a dog that she’s just made friends with on the streets of Depression-[era] New York at Christmastime — no, I’m not tired of that at all. That I could experience over and over and over again. I think that’s the magic of Annie."
When asked whether she's relishing the chance to play a nasty character, the former TV talk-show host says, "Every actress will tell you it's a lot more fun to play a villain, but the easy thing to do would be to play her as a one-note nasty human being. And that's, I think, a disservice to not only the role but to our audiences. Nobody's born like Miss Hannigan. She becomes like that, so what I'm trying to do, as an actress, is find why she went from being a precious baby — which every baby is — to this incredibly disappointed, nasty woman who takes [her frustrations] out on the less fortunate. . . . I believe she's a woman who had big dreams like every little girl does — and none of her dreams came true. And when she finds out that Annie, of all people, her little nemesis at the orphanage, is [having] all of her dreams come true, it's almost more than she can bear. It's what sets her over the edge. But [Miss Hannigan] had a rotten mother. When she and Rooster sing 'Easy Street,' they're describing their upbringing — a woman who told them, 'Go out, get to Easy Street, no matter who you hurt, no matter who you rape and pillage along the way.'"
When talking to Gifford, one gets the feeling that as much as she enjoys working in front of an audience or a camera, her real passion — aside from her family and family of friends — is her writing. "What I've been experiencing the last seven years," she says, "is having the thrill and the privilege of watching people of the echelon of talent [of Carolee Carmello and Ed Dixon] doing my work."
That work, to date, includes the Off-Broadway musical Under the Bridge, which was based on the Newbury Award-winning book "The Family Under the Bridge," and featured music by David Pomeranz; and Hats!, which features songs by a plethora of noted songwriters and is currently enjoying an extended world-premiere engagement at the New Denver Civic Center.
Gifford's two new writing projects are Saving Aimee, about the evangelist-celebrity Aimee Semple McPherson, which features music by David Pomeranz and David Friedman and will bow at DC's Signature Theatre this spring; and an original musical titled In Canaan's Eyes.
About Saving Aimee — "a true story of a woman who lived and changed the world as she knew it at the time" — Gifford says she has worked hard to remain true to McPherson's legacy: "Of all people to write stories of real people, I'm probably the best person because I know what tabloid journalism can do to one's legacy, and I'm really, really careful to be fair. I think you can take all kinds of dramatic license as long as you're fair. I know how it hurts when people aren't fair, as it's something I've experienced personally more times than I want to recount. Amy's 96-year-old daughter, I'm hoping, will be [at the Signature premiere], along with her 93-year-old son."
Previous readings of Saving Aimee have boasted the talents of Tony Award-winning Grey Gardens star Christine Ebersole — "she was spectacular in it" — and Mamma Mia!'s current leading lady, Carolee Carmello. Although Gifford isn't at liberty to confirm that Carmello will star in the Signature run, she does say, "I can't even imagine it without her in it. . . Oh God, I love that woman!" It was Carmello, in fact, who suggested that the role of McPherson, originally written for two actresses, be played by one. "I didn’t think anyone could play Amy from 17 to 54," says Gifford. "She's in almost every scene, and there's 22 songs, and she sings, I think, 19 of them. And it's a very difficult score. . . . [Carolee] knew the score at that point, and I said, 'Carolee, if you’re crazy enough to sing it, I am crazy enough to go back and rethink the whole thing.' So I think it was three or four years ago I did. I rewrote the whole thing, and it came to life. Her instincts were absolutely right. It's awkward to go from young child to [an adult] . . . but she's such a peerless actress, it just works." Continued...
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