Music director Mary-Mitchell Campbell will smooth-over the musical spots of Jessica Kostival, who went into labor a week before the show and gave birth to a baby girl.
Campbell, who is the busy music supervisor/orchestrator for Broadway's Company, will fill in some of the songs, opposite spot-lighted Alison Cimmet (eight months pregnant) and Jenni Frost (eight months pregnant).
Cimmet appeared in the first Hot Mamas! The Mother of All Cabarets (with Carol Johnson and Jodi Darling) when she was pregnant in April 2004. A second version was mounted in 2005 with three different actresses (Sandy Rustin, Alisa Klein and Jessica Walling-Stokes) at Ars Nova.
"The show has been through some changes, with many new songs added," Cimmet told Playbill.com. "It's very exciting. We're hoping to continue to develop it and eventually make it into a marketable full-length musical."
Both Cimmet and Frost are due to deliver around Dec. 25. Frost's credits include the musical Infertility (that's irony for you), and Cimmet recently played Sally Cato in Mame at The Kennedy Center with Christine Baranski. Tesha Buss (director) and Mary-Mitchell Campbell have been attached to the show — which features standard and new songs from many songwriters — from the beginning.
Hot Mamas! includes original songs by Bobby Lopez, Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Emily Schiff-Glenn, Gavin Creel, Amanda Yesnowitz, Deborah Abramson, Jill Abramovitz, Brad Alexander, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Tesha Buss, Sara Wordsworth, James Allen Ford, Steve Marzullo, Brent Lord, Todd Almond, Bill Augustin, Andy Abrams, Leslie Becker, Georgia Stitt, Denver Casado and Betina Hershey.
The 8 PM Nov. 13 show at Symphony Space's Thalia will be a benefit for ASTEP (Artists Striving to End Poverty), Campbell's not-for-profit organization.
Symphony Space is at 95th and Broadway. It is produced by Geoff Cohen and ASTEP.
Tickets are $21. For information, visit www.SymphonySpace.org.
For more information about ASTEP visit http://www.createsomethinggood.org.
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Since the original Hot Mamas in 2004, two of the writers (Georgia Stitt and Kristen Anderson-Lopez) had babies of their own.
