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DIVA TALK: Chatting with Tony Winner Harriet Harris Plus Vintage Minnelli and Bassey
By Andrew Gans
10 Feb 2006
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Tony Award winner Harriet Harris.
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News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert/cabaret stage.
HARRIET HARRIS
It's a busy time for Harriet Harris, the gifted actress who won a Tony Award for her comical portrayal of Mrs. Meers in the 2002 Tony-winning Best Musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. Not only is Harris currently filming additional scenes for her recurring role as Felicia Tilman on the hit ABC series "Desperate Housewives," but the good-humored performer is also in rehearsals for the West Coast premiere of Never Gonna Dance, which begins a limited engagement at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center in Long Beach, CA, Feb. 18. Harris will play Mabel Pritt in the production, which is being directed by Larry Raben for Musical Theatre West. After the musical, which boasts songs from the Jerome Kern songbook, ends its run in March, Harris will turn her attention to the Kennedy Center's mounting of Jerry Herman's Mame, which will feature her Vera Charles opposite the Mame of Christine Baranski. I recently had the chance to chat with the charming Harris, who currently resides in Los Angeles; that interview follows.
Question: How did you get involved with this production of Never Gonna Dance?
Harriet Harris: Earlier this year I did On the Town with Reprise!, which was an awful lot of fun. A very talented and saintly choreographer named Lee Martino was working on that. She did fabulous choreography for everybody. She's just wonderful. She called me about this, and she said that my name had come up, and she thought it would be a great idea. So, I thought, "God, there's a choreographer who's actually willing to work with me twice in a row!" [Laughs.] I thought that was really nice. I'm going to give it my best shot, but it's a lot more dancing than I'm used to doing.
Q: Which role will you be playing?
Harris: Mabel. She's the sidekick. She's not Ginger Rogers, she's the other one! It's a nice role, and it's got a long of songs, and it apparently has a lot of dancing. [Laughs.]
Q: What songs will you get to perform?
Harris: "Shimmy With Me," "I Got Love," and I sing part of "The Song Is You." There are parts of other numbers that I'm in that at this point I'm unaware of what they are, since we just haven't gotten that far in rehearsals.
Q: Are you a Jerome Kern fan?
Harris: I saw all of the Fred and Ginger movies when I was growing up and skipping school. I do love them. If you can be in a musical, you'd be nuts not to do it. It's just a great opportunity. I like the cast, and I've worked with some of them before, and I'm really enjoying it. But it's such hard work.
Q: Was it the movies that got you interested in becoming an actress or was it the stage?
Harris: I think it was the stage. I grew up in Fort Worth. When I was growing up, there was one venue, and that was Casa Manana. I saw a lot of musicals as a kid. They're just splendid. If you like 'em when you're a kid, it's sort of ingrained in you. When I was really a child, I thought I would grow up and be a musical comedy star. [Laughs.] Then I realized what it really took and I thought, "That's probably not going to happen for me." By that time I had gotten very interested in other things. I went to school and was exposed to a lot of other [possibilities]. I suddenly thought, "This is probably more where my talents are," and I kind of forgot about doing musicals, and I thought it was certainly no loss to the world and probably a good thing for me, because my strengths seem to be elsewhere. But there are certain parts [I can play] — it's a very generous world that will accept a lot of different talents, and sometimes I think I'm the right person for the job and sometimes maybe I’m not.
Q: It's funny, though, because you did win your Tony for a musical comedy.
Harris: Yeah, it was wonderful. That was a terrific [experience]. That was a production where some people could really sing, some people could really dance, some people could really tell a story. If I get to do more musicals, that's probably where I'll really get to do things. But in the meantime if people are willing to work with me, then I can learn. I can work on my dancing, I can work on my singing.
Q: What are your memories of working on Thoroughly Modern Millie?
Harris: I loved it. I was very fortunate to get the job. I had done the first reading of it, and that was a remarkable thing, and for a while I thought I was going to get be part of it [on Broadway], and then it morphed into this thing where they needed a star to be in that part, and then it morphed back out of that so it could be me again. . . . I play a lot of eccentric parts. I almost never have a partner onstage. I'm almost always the outsider, and in this role I was certainly the villainess, but I had these [two] unwilling henchmen. And Francis Jue and Ken Leung, they're just two of the most wonderful actors that you can find, and they are the most fun people that you can be with to create something like this. Francis had done musicals before, but I think it was as new to Ken as it was to me, and the three of us just had a ball together. And that was absolutely the best part — just showing up to work every day. It was almost as thrilling as being a kid out of acting school. We were there to amuse each other, to support each other, to challenge each other. So that was just thrilling and, of course, to get to be surrounded by all these people who had all this talent that seemed to accept what we had to offer. It was great to be surrounded by the music and the energy of all these highly developed talents that still thought there was room for what we had to give.
Q: I remember in your Tony speech you dedicated the award to another actress, Meghan Robinson. What was her influence on you?
Harris: She was just a wonderful actress and an even better friend. She was my best friend, and she was hilariously funny. She did a lot of Charles Busch's plays. [One play] was going to be called Gidget Goes Psychotic, but I think they couldn't use [that title], so it was called Psycho Beach Party. She was in Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. She sort of had goddess energy. She was so great with Charles. He and Julie Halston and I were just in awe of what Meghan could do. She was just a terrifically wonderful person. We would call each other on the phone and say, "Oh this part's for you. You should be seen for this." We hardly ever crossed into each other's turf except for really big parts, really broad stuff. . . . I just thought that she was an inspired person, and it would have been a part she would have been great in, too.
Q: How did the role on "Desperate Housewives" come about?
Harris: I had done a series out here a long time ago called "The 5 Mrs. Buchanans," and that was ["Housewives" creator] Marc Cherry's show, too. And when he knew that Christine Estabrook had to die [on "Housewives"] — which I don't think anyone wanted to have happen — I played her sister before in another series, so I think I seemed like a natural choice to him for this.
Q: There's been so much written about "Housewives." What's it actually like performing on the show?
Harris: It's a very fun part. . . . I never have any talks with the producers or anything like that about what's going on or what I'm really up to or after. I just kind of have to guess. Sometimes I read the scripts and I'm really surprised. And sometimes I think, "I thought that's what's going on!" It's almost like a scavenger hunt because you're looking for things along the way. It's a lot of fun.
Q: What do you think of the character?
Harris: Well, aside from that it's wonderfully acted [laughs], I always think that even if she is a bad person, she doesn't think so. But I thought that about Mrs. Meers, and certainly she was a bad person.
Q: Do you find yourself being recognized more than ever since being on "Housewives"?
Harris: I think in certain places, yeah, but there's so many people out here — because I live in L.A. — who are involved in television. They know me from all sorts of different things. Certain places I would go, no one's ever gonna know who I am. [Laughs.]
Q: Have you always lived in L.A.?
Harris: No, I lived in New York for many, many years. I came out here with Paul Rudnick's play Jeffrey in the fall of '93. I was here for that big earthquake in '94, and called home and talked to my friend Henry Stram, who is a marvelous actor, and said, "Oh my God, what should I do?" And Henry said, "Are you working?" [Laughs.] I thought, "That's true." That kind of answered [the question]. There was work here, so I stayed. Continued...
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