SPRING AWAKENINGS

THEATRE

SPRING Awakenings Eight singular talents from on- and Off-Broadway productions

BY MARSHALL HEYMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN ALVARADO

Jane Lynch

ACTOR Lynch, star of Glee and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, grew up in Illinois listening to the Broadway cast album of Funny Girl. Now, the actress is starring as Fanny Brice’s mother in a revival of the show opposite Beanie Feldstein. “I couldn’t be more thrilled. It’s such a wonderful American musical,” says Lynch. The film version, starring Barbra Streisand, “always doubles me over with laughter and breaks my heart wide open.” The show marks Lynch’s return to Broadway after she appeared as Miss Hannigan in an Annie revival a decade ago. “You put your absolute whole self into it,” she says. “[Broadway] feels more like home to me than any other place in the world.”

CULTURE

Tracy Letts, PLAYWRIGHT AND ACTOR, AND Anna Shapiro, DIRECTOR

“I never want to perform in one of my own plays, and, in fact, I have never performed in one of my own plays before now,” says Letts, whose latest play to hit Broadway, The Minutes, is about a city council meeting in a fictional town. When the show first premiered at Steppenwolf in Chicago, the role of the mayor was played by another performer. In New York, Letts steps in. “Mayor Superba is just a good role for me,” explains Letts. “I mean, objectively speaking, I would cast me.”

“In Chicago, we are the home team,” says The Minutes director Shapiro. “Oddly, [audiences there] can be harder on us.” That said, she adds, “Every time we work in New York, we always suspect no one will come. So we’re always pleasantly surprised.”

Lileana Blain-Cruz

DIRECTOR Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, written in 1942, is often performed regionally, but it hasn’t seen a large New York production in quite some time. Enter Lincoln Center and Blain-Cruz. “I was looking for a play that wrestled with what it means to be alive in the midst of chaos, a play that would speak to the moment we’ve been living through,” she says of what drew her to the piece. “The Skin of Our Teeth was a catalyst for so much experimental theater. It gets at the way life can be a combination of joy, pain, excitement, hilariousness, grief and strangeness all at the same time.”

Patrick J. Adams

ACTOR Before performances started for the revival of Richard Greenberg’s Take Me Out on Broadway, Adams, who starred for many seasons on the television series Suits, was initially scared of “showering in front of 500 people every night.” The play, about a baseball player who unexpectedly comes out of the closet, features a few naked shower scenes. “What’s scarier now is that it’s my job to kick off the narrative and draw the audience in,” explains Adams. “I take it seriously and don’t want to let down the playwright or the audience.”

Joaquina Kalukango

ACTOR Originating a role in a brand-new Broadway musical like Paradise Square “was a huge dream of mine,” says Kalukango, who was Tony-nominated for her performance in Slave Play in 2020. By all accounts, Kalukango blows the roof off the Barrymore Theatre as Nelly O’Brien, the owner of a saloon in Manhattan during the Civil War. “I feel a strong connection with Nelly’s bullshit meter,” Kalukango adds. “She can spot a liar a mile away, and so can I.”

Alex Edelman

ACTOR Nobody guessed that a solo show from comedian and writer Edelman would become a hit, but that’s what happened with Just for Us, which is now running through late July at the the Greenwich House Theater. Originally, the piece, about a strange and uncomfortable excursion Edelman took one night to a meeting of white nationalists in Queens, “was meant to be just a sweet and small six-week thing.” Trust us, if you’re a New Yorker (or you’ve ever been a New Yorker), you’ll laugh—a lot. (Sarah Jessica Parker is a fan.) “I like jokes and shows that are a little more ‘high-risk’ than the average standup thing,” Edelman says.

Chasten Harmon

ACTOR In the big new musical Mr. Saturday Night, Harmon stars as Annie Wells, agent to Buddy Young Jr., an old-school comedian trying to make a comeback. Billy Crystal played Buddy in the 1992 movie of the same name (his directorial debut), and he’s now playing the role onstage opposite Harmon at the Nederlander Theatre. What has Harmon already learned from the comic master? “Know yourself. Stay true to yourself. Believe in yourself,” says Harmon. “You don’t get a career like Billy has by taking whatever you can get. You get it by being intentional with every single thing you say yes to.”