Pool halls. The stereotypical image is a place that's smoky, dimly lit, frequented by hustlers and truants—not a place where dreams come true. But that's just what it was for
Renée Klapmeyer.
One evening in 2001, while Klapmeyer was cocktail waitressing at Amsterdam Billiards in Manhattan, she heard her cell phone ringing continually behind the bar. She took a bathroom break to check the messages. "It was my agent saying, 'You got 42nd Street. You're going to be on Broadway,'" says Klapmeyer, who had auditioned for the show that afternoon. "I was bawling in the bathroom. One of the regulars was standing outside of the stall and she's like, 'Are you okay?' I was like, [in tears] 'Yeah, I just got a call, I'm gonna be on Broadway!'"
As if making her Broadway debut just two years after graduating from college wasn't enough, Klapmeyer was also selected to be a face of the show's advertising campaign. She was featured, in costume, with an inset of her as a child, on posters that went up on phone booths around the city. Echoing a line from the title tune, the poster read: "Come and meet Renée Klapmeyer, one of the stars in the chorus." She was one of only three chorus girls chosen for the ads.
She also got some television exposure during the show's run. The 42nd Street cast performed on Rosie O'Donnell and David Letterman and opened the 2001 Tony Awards by dancing out of a subway station and down the aisles of Radio City Music Hall. Another side project that arose from 42nd Street: Klapmeyer sang the national anthem (and the seventh-inning-stretch "God Bless America") at Shea Stadium. "I felt like Britney Spears. The crowd was going wild."
Good fortune has followed Klapmeyer into her next show, The Producers. Last year, after 12-plus months in the Producers tour, she decided she wanted to be back in New York. Within days of her giving her notice for the tour, a slot opened up in The Producers' Broadway ensemble. That's where she is now, appearing—among other guises—as a royal blue-clad theatergoer, a hooker, one of Max Bialystock's randy little old ladies and a pretzel singing the praises of Adolf Hitler. When the little old ladies return for Max's trial late in Act II, she sits in the front row of the jury box and, in a bit of improvisation, stealthily paws at Leo (Hunter Foster).
She also understudies Leo's bombshell paramour Ulla—a role she played to much acclaim on the road for a few months, after nearly a year in the tour's ensemble. One Detroit review raved about her "leggy vivaciousness and expert comedic timing"; another called her "tall, leggy, altogether magnificent" and said she "lights up the stage."
There was one stumbling block—or, more precisely, one very scary stumble—on her way to Ulla. A couple of hours before her first performance as Ulla, in Chicago, she and Andy Taylor (Leo) were rehearsing "That Face," which contains a lift that had given previous Ullas trouble—one of them even broke her ankle on the landing. "I'm a little bit smaller than the girl who was doing it before me. This may be why I was so far above Andy's head that when I came down to land I couldn't get my foot down [properly]. I just twisted over on my ankle. It wasn't broken, because I could walk on it, but it was swollen out to there." She was allowed to decide for herself whether to go on that night. "I was like: Honestly, you're going to have to tell me to sit out. So I iced it and wrapped it and went on that night. We had to put more holes in the strap of my shoe because it was so swollen."
At the doctor's the next day, she learned she had torn three tendons and chipped a bone. But she refused to have a cast put on, and she never missed a performance. Descending the stairs in high heels during "Springtime for Hitler" was especially painful, as was sitting on the desk with her legs folded beneath her in "When You Got It, Flaunt It." The suffering literally built her character. "It helped me because I had never played the role and I was so nervous," Klapmeyer says. "When this happened, when I went out there, I just had to focus on my ankle, so my nerves were out of the picture. It helped me get in the role and be grounded."
