Catch Me If You Can's songwriter Marc Shaiman to New York magazine: "Gorgeous, leggy girls...we have some of the most gorgeous on Broadway." The show's director, Jack O'Brien, to the Wall Street Journal: "[Choreographer] Jerry Mitchell asked for the ten most beautiful women he could get into the rehearsal room. And he managed to find them." Shaiman's co-writer, Scott Wittman, to Playbill: "We have, I must say, ten of the most beautiful girls on Broadway."
Sarrah Strimel, one of those terrific ten: "I look in the mirror and say, What were they thinking?"
Strimel recalls the first time she and her fellow Catch Me catches rehearsed the fan-dance number "Butter Outta Cream." She kept dropping her fan or turning it the wrong way. "Jack O'Brien just shook his head and put his face in his hands and was like, 'You are the worst showgirl,'" she says with a laugh.
O'Brien was being facetious, but the 5-foot-11 Strimel claims, "I'm actually really bad at being a showgirl, because I'm awful with props. I'm a notorious klutz. My friends call me Baby Giraffe, because I can't walk down the street without tripping or whacking my head on a tree."
Nonetheless, the Catch Me If You Can team was not the first to put her in a showgirl-type ensemble. Strimel's first two Broadway shows, The Producers and Young Frankenstein, were directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman ("who loves her leggy women," says Strimel), and she's played chorines in such shows as 42nd Street and Minsky's regionally. Strimel's last Broadway appearance was a departure, though: rocking out to 1980s hair metal in torn, metal-studded skankwear. "I love doing the showgirl thing, being the classy, pulled-up glamour girl of the period," she says. "But doing Rock of Ages is who I am inside. I got to unleash!"
Strimel took over for original cast member Katherine Tokarz in the Rock of Ages ensemble last spring and stayed with the show till it wrapped its run at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre right after New Year's (it has since reopened in the smaller Helen Hayes Theatre). In 2009, Strimel worked on two new musicals that had their world premieres in southern California: Sammy, a biographical musical about Sammy Davis Jr., at San Diego's Old Globe, and Minsky's, set in the Depression-era world of burlesque, which played the Ahmanson in L.A. Her earlier regional parts include Bombalurina in Cats at Theatre Under the Stars in Houston and Stupifyin' Jones in Lil Abner at Connecticut's Goodspeed Opera House.
It was The Producers that really got her career going. Strimel first auditioned for the show, then casting its original Broadway production, right after she graduated from high school. She had her Equity card thanks to a season at Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera and was rarin' to go, if not exactly well-schooled in how to conduct herself at an audition. "I had really white blond hair and too much makeup on," she says, and her song choice, "Nobody Does It Like Me" from Seesaw, "was more appropriate for someone auditioning for the dirty old lady in The Producers, not the beautiful showgirl."
She didn't get a part, but, unbeknownst to her, she made a good impression. A couple of years later, she was contacted by Tara Rubin's office, which had taken over casting for The Producers from the late Vinnie Liff. Rubin still had Strimel's headshot, with Liff's positive comments written on the back. They invited her in, and four auditions later she had a role on the second national tour. Strimel dropped out of college in fall 2003, five credits short of graduating, to join The Producers. The following year she moved onto the first national tour, and after doing the show in Japan she made her Broadway debut in The Producers in 2006. She was in the final cast as the show completed its six-year, Tony- and box-office-record-breaking run. And then the Producers creators cast her in their next Broadway project, Young Frankenstein, which ran for over a year.
Which all sounds great...but it's not the way it was supposed to happen. Strimel was supposed to make her Broadway debut in 2005 in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. She'd left the Producers tour and turned down a role in the Producers movie when she was cast in Chitty, rented an apartment in New York and was excited about making her Broadway debut in the original cast of a new musical. Except two weeks into rehearsal, she was fired. They'd made a "casting mistake," the director and choreographer told her, stressing that "it's not you, it's us—our mistake."
