Eugene was calling to tell me that the girl who was cast to sing “Day by Day” was leaving the show. That night there was going to be a party for the entire cast, and he thought that if I showed up and was my wacky, character-y self, the director would see me and give me the job. I hung up and immediately put the canvas belt around my hips for a two-hour “workout” that consisted of the belt moving furiously around my lower body and giving me a skin rash but zero weight loss. But it didn’t matter how I looked for Godspell. I showed up that night, cracked a few jokes, flashed ye olde perky tits, and got the part. It was the show that launched many careers: mine and those of Gilda, Eugene, Jayne Eastwood, Martin Short, Victor Garber, and our music director, Paul Shaffer. From that moment on, it was referred to as the Legendary Canadian Company of Godspell.
Clockwise from bottom left : Gilda Radner, Gerry Salsberg, Valda Aviks, Victor Garber, Avril Chown, Rudy Webb, Marty Short, Jayne Eastwood, and Eugene Levy, with me in the centre
In the audience for opening night of the 2011 Broadway revival of Godspell. From left to right : Victor Garber, Stephen Schwartz, Marty Short, me, Eugene Levy, and Paul Shaffer
A dancer might dream of working with Bob Fosse or Michael Bennett or Twyla Tharp; a screen actor, John Huston or Martin Scorsese; but for a character actress/comedienne, there’s no one more idolized than Mel Brooks. I had the great opportunity to work with Mel when he adapted his film Young Frankenstein to the Broadway stage in 2007. Susan Stroman directed Mel Brooks’s Young Frankenstein the Musical, and I was cast in the iconic role of the housekeeper Frau Blücher, the role originally created in the movie by Cloris Leachman.
Mel loved improvisation. And, of course, my background was in improv, but I was timid in front of him. While we were in previews I wanted to change a couple of lines that weren’t working, and by that I mean, I wasn’t getting the laughs I thought I could get. I sought advice from two of my friends, Marty Short and Nathan Lane, both of them having starred in Mel’s previous and enormously successful musical The Producers. They both said, “Don’t ask Mel if you can add a line. During a performance just do it, and if it gets a laugh, he’ll let you keep it in.”
So one night during previews in Seattle, we came to the scene at the castle where Frau Blücher (Horse whinny.) first meets Frederick von Frankenstein and his assistant, the voluptuous, buxom, sexy Inga. Think Pamela Anderson.
Frau Blücher is the first to speak.
FRAU BLÜCHER, sounding ominous: Good evening and velcome, Doctor Frankenstein. And who, may I ask, is this lovely young creature?
FREDERICK: She is my new laboratory assistant, Inga. FRAU BLÜCHER: Assistant, huh? How do you do?
That’s what was written. But that night, after I said “Assistant, huh?” I paused, looked at Inga, and added, “So that’s vat they’re calling them these days.”
After a very long, exaggerated laugh, Frau Blücher continues. “How do you do?”
The audience roared. Mel came backstage after the show. He pointed at me and yelled, “It’s in, but no credit!”
You know, it was one of those moments in my career that I took for granted, working with the one and only Mel Brooks. I was caught up in the job and how to make Frau Blücher my own. Now when I look back on that time, I think of how fortunate I was to have worked with the comedy legend Mel Brooks, who now, in his eighties, still has the desire and the drive to make people laugh. He was opinionated and stubborn, but it was impossible to get angry with him. I remember when Anne Bancroft, Mel’s wife of over thirty years, was interviewed by Charlie Rose, and he asked her what the secret of their long marriage was. She replied, “Oh, we’ve had our ups and downs like any couple, but every time I hear the key in the door, I know the party is about to start.”
Mel sat in the audience every night for six weeks during our previews. He wrote a song for Frau Blücher, “He Vas My Boyfriend,” and it was poignant and thrilling for me to perform it for him every night.
When I was offered the role of Berthe, Pippin’s grandmother, a part originally played by Irene Ryan, who gained fame for her role as Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies, I adamantly said no. Has it come to this? I thought. Now I’m being offered the part of a grandmother who makes her entrance in a wheelchair? My old lady/character parts have suddenly morphed into invalids? Forget it! Surely I have a few more years of middle-aged women roles left in me. Right at the climax of a hysterical rant to my agent where I told him he might as well submit me for the revival of Driving Miss Daisy, I stopped in my tracks. My agent had interrupted me to inform me that the director Diane Paulus was going to collaborate with Les 7 doigts de la main, a circus troupe from Montreal. Suddenly everything changed, and I had an image of myself as the little clown Giulietta Masina in Fellini’s La Strada, and not a dowager’s-humped Miss Havisham in a bus and truck tour of Great Expectations.
I’d always had the fantasy of running away with the circus. Not the Cirque du Soleil version of circus but the darker side of circus, the freak-show version of circus, the Fellini version of circus where magic meets poignancy, where ugly meets spectacle, where mangled, extraordinary misfits with otherworldly gifts congregate, where there is no discrimination.
Who doesn’t think of running away with the circus, metaphorically or literally?
It’s the ancient heart of show business, the spirit of the travelling sideshow, older than vaudeville. Whenever I went to the circus, I had a religious feeling, like I was connecting to a tradition, to a long and flavoured dynasty. Elemental. Powerful. And I loved the weird spirit of the all-in view of entertainment. Animals, acrobats, freaks, clowns … nothing and no one was excluded from the circus. It was a beautiful, bountiful, generous view of the world.
I came close to running away with the circus in 1968. I was enrolled at Jacques Lecoq’s École du Mime in Paris. This was the year of the student rebellion in Paris, of the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, but I was looking for my inner clown on the Avenue du Shtick.
I never completed the two-year course with Monsieur Lecoq. It was hard for me to be away from everyone I knew, so I returned home early and completed my speech/theatre degree at Emerson College, but I always regretted the decision of not finishing the course and sticking around long enough to see where that training might have taken me.
So before I passed on the Pippin offer, I asked my agent to set up a phone call with Diane Paulus, to hear how she planned on reimagining the show and what her take on Berthe was.
I then spent the afternoon listening to the Pippin score and, specifically, to the song “No Time at All.” When Stephen Schwartz wrote that show-stopping number back in 1972, he was writing for the character of a sixty-six-year-old grandmother. But forty years ago, sixty-six looked very different from how it looks now. Life spans have increased—we are now living into our nineties, and sixty-six doesn’t feel like the end of a life but the beginning of a third chapter.
The chorus of the song begins with the lyric “Oh, it’s time to start living …”
In the original production, Berthe sings this to inspire the young Pippin as he searches to find meaning in his life. I had seen the show in my twenties and enjoyed the vaude-villian take Bob Fosse applied to the number. But the lyrics didn’t have relevance to me then. Listening to them now as a sixty-six-year old woman, the line “it’s time to start living” resonated deeply with me.
I went to bed that night and thought of Berthe as part of the circus troupe. The words that summed up the song to me were
Here is a secret I never have told
Maybe you’ll understand why
I believe if I refuse to grow old
I can stay young till I die.
As I lay under the covers, I had a vision of Berthe as a young circus performer. Perhaps during her number the audience could see what she had been like in her prime—sometimes musicals have flashback scenes, with a second actor playing the youthful version of a character, as in Follies. Once again, I thought of Be
rthe’s lyrics:
I believe if I refuse to grow old
I can stay young till I die.
Maybe I could be the sixty-six-year-old Berthe and also the young Berthe in her prime?
The next day, Diane and I talked to each other for the first time, on the phone, and within a few seconds of the start of our conversation I began to excitedly rattle off questions: “Why can’t the character of Berthe be feisty and sexy and agile and strong and determined and full of life, all the attributes that I could bring to the table? Why should we have to talk down to an audience and perform a clichéd version of a grandmother? We have an opportunity with the material to inspire women, not depress them. And if every other character in your concept of Pippin is part of a circus troupe, why can’t Berthe also be a circus performer?”
Diane then introduced herself. I continued spewing out my ideas. I told her I would be interested in taking the journey of her version of Pippin if she was open to Berthe performing a traditional circus routine in the show. I told her I was willing to go to circus school so that the routine we came up with would be authentic instead of a sight gag.
Diane was open to all my ideas, and I signed on for the three-week pre-Broadway workshop at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Diane is the artistic director. The brilliant Gypsy Snider, one of the founders of Les 7 doigts de la main, was Pippin’s circus choreographer. She knew I wanted to do a circus routine and thought about it for about a week. One day she excitedly ran up to me. “I have the perfect routine for you! The trapeze!” she said.
“Wonderful!” I said. “Sign me on.”
For the entire run of the show, at no point did she know, nor did I ever tell anyone, the following fact: I am desperately afraid of heights. Since being traumatized by my appearance in Harold Ramis’s film Club Paradise, where I demanded to do my own stunt of parasailing, during which the rope that was tethered to the boat came unexpectedly undone and I was left drifting above the Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Jamaica, where I waited for the wind to lower me somewhere that didn’t, I prayed, have sharks, I have become a self-diagnosed acrophobe. Driving over bridges makes me anxious, hiking trails on steep mountains are no longer enjoyable, canopy rides in Costa Rica sent me screaming into the clouds, even looking over my terrace railing, which sits seventeen floors above Manhattan, makes me break out in a sweat.
But I was so determined to live out my fantasy of being a circus performer and, more importantly, to inspire the audience with Stephen Schwartz’s life-affirming lyrics, that I was willing to put aside my fear.
I was told to show up at circus school in Brooklyn and meet my trainer one early morning. Even though I’d always worked out, it became startlingly clear as I tried the different apparatus that I had to completely change my body. Turns out, thirty minutes on the elliptical reading Vanity Fair three times a week doesn’t help you when you have to hang twelve feet above a stage. I had to build my upper body strength and my core, at sixty-six years old. Not since Rocky. From then on, my workout regimen became daily weight lifting and cardio training in the gym, Pilates three times a week, and hot yoga. Plus I lowered my carb intake and cut out all gluten and dairy.
Yannick, one of the French acrobats in the cast, volunteered to be my partner. Gypsy methodically and patiently created a trapeze routine for us. We began with simple movements on the trapeze, low to the ground. Incrementally as I continued training with Yannick daily, I grew stronger, and the trapeze was slowly raised until we were floating twelve feet above the stage.
The Pippin workshop was a success. Diane Paulus’s reimagining of the show was inspired brilliance. Two months later, we opened in Boston for a limited run to rave reviews and the show quickly transferred to Broadway.
We opened at the Music Box Theatre, in New York, on April 25, 2013, again to rave reviews, and for the next six months, eight times a week, Yannick and I performed our routine. And eight times a week, his hands became the only thing keeping me from plunging to my death. Every night as we were raised twelve feet above the stage on a rotating trapeze, my gorgeous twenty-five-year-old French partner looked into my eyes and quietly said in the most reassuring tone, “I will never let you fall. You can trust me.” And I did. There was no net beneath us, no harness, no wires, and yet I was completely surrendered in his arms. There was no room for doubt as I lay suspended horizontally in mid-air, my body rigid in a plank position, my partner’s fingers splayed across the outer edges of my firm belly as he held me beneath him while hanging by his knees on the trapeze. I looked graceful, relaxed, like a gliding bird, my arms outstretched, legs pressed tightly together behind me, my head held high as I stared into the audience with a smile on my face that reached the last row of the theatre.
Twenty years after winning my first Tony Award, I won my second for Pippin. When my name was called, I ran onstage and thanked all my collaborators—Stephen, Diane, Gypsy, and especially Yannick. I told the viewing audience, “I want to thank my partner, Yannick Thomas. Merci, mon chéri, je t’adore.” I continued, unconscious of the double entendre that slipped out of my mouth: “Do you know how wonderful it is for a woman of my age to be held in the arms of a man and not be dropped?” It was an unintended joke, but this portion of my acceptance speech was printed in media outlets across the country.
Over the run, friends and colleagues often came to my dressing room, and all of them asked the same question: “Aren’t you scared on that trapeze?”
Each time, I said the same thing: “I’m aware when I’m up there that I have only two choices: to trust or to panic. I always choose trust. And then I’m not scared.”
My last performance with Pippin was on September 22, 2013. For one last time, I took off the sexy, revealing corseted trapeze outfit that the gracious and inspired Dominique Lemieux had designed for me. I walked directly to Magnolia Bakery. Since then, I haven’t stopped eating carbs, nor have I set foot in a gym. But oh, what a glorious year I had flying through the air with the greatest of ease.
The daring young character actress on the flying trapeze.
*Really overused title.
SCTV, or “What Do You Think of This?”
Ladies and gentlemen, the past program director of SCTV, Mrs. Edith Prickley.
“Hello, Canada and select cities in the USA. Edith Prickley here. And believe me, I don’t want to be. Pahaaaaaa!!!!! I got better things to do than reminisce. I still have a whole drawer of underwear to wash and iron. But what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t turn my back on an old friend. Andrea called me out of the blue this morning. Haven’t heard hide nor hair from her in thirty years. There we were, Mr. Prickley and I, watching reruns of Shark Tank in our newly renovated ensuite at the Barrie Country Club and Retirement Village, when the phone rang.
“I thought it was those damn animal activists again. They cornered me in the parking lot at 7 a.m., just as my Zumba class was getting out. I was headed to kundalini practice when they started picketing my leopard outfit. They walked over to me and yelled, ‘Edith, do you know how many animals had to die so you could wear that jacket?’ and I said, ‘Do you know how many animals I had to sleep with to get it?’ Pahaaaaaa!!!!! At my age, I speak my mind.
“Well, it turns out, it wasn’t those fanatics on the other end, it was a sad Armenian clown, and she was in a pickle. Saved her SCTV chapter for last and didn’t know where to begin. She needed her memory jump-started and that’s why she called me, yours truly, Mrs. P., to do her dirty work. Well, she called the wrong person. I don’t remember a damn thing about my life or hers. I’m old. But personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass. I make up stuff all the time. And that’s just what I told her to do. Who the hell’s gonna know the difference? No one cares about the truth, they just want to know if John Candy was as nice a guy as he seemed. And he was. And if everyone got along. And they did. Fear will get you nowhere, Ms. Martin, so as my first husband, William Carlos Williams, said, ‘Write what’s in front of your nose.’
“I’m at that awkward age between retirement and a lovely coma.
“I’m so old, I still think Mel Gibson’s a catch.
“I’m so old, macramé’s starting to make sense to me.
“I’m so old, I remember when the Dead Sea was only sick.
“But that doesn’t stop me. I keep on going. I say what I want and don’t give a shit what anyone thinks.”
“And so must you, Ms. Martin. Write whatever the hell comes to mind. Invent stuff. And then hire a lawyer.”
Aw … Mrs. Edith Prickley. I love that broad. She’s my alter ego. Who needs Pema Chödrön for enlightenment when you’ve got Edith Prickley by your side? She may not be a Buddhist nun, and she’s loud and garish, but she’s fearless. She imparts words of wisdom to the common man.
Mrs. Prickley has rescued me many times in my life. Just thinking of her makes me feel indomitable.
Lady Parts Page 18
