BWW Interviews: Leslie Kritzer is NOW Leslie Kritzer at Joe's Pub

Leslie Kritzer's last show at Joe's Pub, Leslie Kritzer Is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches, was extended multiple times and won her a Special Achievement MAC Award. Since that 2006-07 engagement, Kritzer has appeared on Broadway in Legally Blonde (for which she received Actors' Equity's Clarence Derwent Award as most promising female performer) and A Catered Affair (for which she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award) and garnered an Outer Critics Circle nomination for the off-Broadway musical Rooms. On May 1, Kritzer will be back on the Joe's Pub stage with Beautiful Disaster, her new cabaret that recounts her tumultuous senior year of high school. Performances are scheduled for 9:30 p.m. May 1-3.

Last year, Kritzer costarred on Broadway with Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat (her Catered Affair dad) in Sondheim on Sondheim and was then in the world-premiere cast of The Memory Show, a musical about a woman returning home to care for her Alzheimer's-stricken mother, at Barrington Stage Company in the Berkshires. She first received widespread acclaim when, at age 23, she played Fanny Brice in Funny Girl at Paper Mill Playhouse in her home state of New Jersey in 2001. More recently, she was Sally Bowles in Cabaret at Houston's Theatre Under the Stars, Hildy the cabbie in the City Center Encores! production of On the Town and the angel Gabriel in the 2009 NYMF favorite Judas and Me. Kritzer also received a Drama Desk nom for The Great American Trailer Park Musical and has found fans online via her YouTube videos, which include an audition sketch for Saturday Night Live where she portrays Liza Minnelli, Amy Winehouse, Rachel Zoe and Bristol Palin.

A week before Beautiful Disaster's opening, Kritzer spoke with BroadwayWorld about the show's creation and her own personal growth, both as a teenager and as a theater veteran. For tickets to Leslie's show at Joe's Pub, call 212-967-7555 or buy them here.

Have you done any cabarets before this other than Patti LuPone?
I did one, like, 10 years ago when I first moved to the city, but it was only one performance at Ars Nova. I don't even think we called it anything. I just kind of threw it together with a friend, and my now boyfriend was my accompanist. It was very informal, just something to do. I only wanted to do something [again] if it meant something to me. I'm not the kind of person that just does something to do it. That's why I did the Patti LuPone show: The challenge of it, and it was very interesting—the history of the show and the time that it took place in New York—and I was really inspired by my director's passion for her, and I also very much admired her.

Is Beautiful Disaster autobiographical?
Yes.

Is it 100% accurate?
No. I wish they had a word for "autobiographical with liberties taken." I've been compiling pieces of it for a long time, and then I said, I don't consider myself someone who can write this show alone—I really want a collaborator. Randy Blair, who is cowriting with me, kind of has my comic sensibility. He's a friend, and we work really well together. We had been throwing ideas back and forth: Would it be an evening of my impressions, or my original characters, like a Gilda Radner thing? And we kept coming back to the stuff that meant a lot to me, which was where I grew up and where I'm from. But when you're talking about your life, the stories may be interesting but you have to theatricalize them. There are certain things that are way more heightened, and hopefully the audience goes along with it. We use devices in the show that allow for you to go: Okay, this is for theatrical use. There's a lot of truth in it, and then there's a lot of things that are made to entertain.

What's unique about your life story that made it cabaret material?
Well, I am half Puerto Rican, half Jewish, and I grew up in a very affluent town, Livingston, New Jersey, right outside the city. My parents were going through a horrific divorce, and my senior year I was ready to be the lead in the high school play. I certainly wasn't the star of my high school, but it was like, I wanted my due. I had gone through all this crap with my parents' divorce and we had to move out of our house that I grew up in—it was just a mess, an awful, awful divorce. And I thought I was going to get my due by getting the lead in the high school musical, and I didn't get it. It was kind of a slow decline from there. My parents' divorce got worse, and I got worse because of that. I almost failed out of school and started getting involved in things—which I don't want to ruin [for the show]—where I could have gotten into a lot of trouble. It's like a survival story, about how I pulled myself together and all the cast of characters that are around me in high school and that nostalgia that goes along with it. I pulled my life together and wound up getting out of there and graduating from school on time—which could have very easily not gone in that direction, if certain things didn't happen the way they did.

What have you discovered in writing about your life?
The reason I called it Beautiful Disaster is, from what I've learned over my [mumbles a number] years of life, a lot of sh-- happens, but out of that wonderful things happen. It happens in nature, it happens in our lives every day. There's all the coulda-woulda-shoulda...what I'm trying to get across in the show is that your life plays out exactly as it should. I can't go back and rewrite it. But I can go back and look at it so I can appreciate it for what it was, not what it should or could have been.
It's an evolving acceptance. I can't say that every day I'm perfect at it. I think I'm getting better as I get older. We ask ourselves all the time, Why do bad things happen to good people? Why did the tsunami happen? Why do innocent people die? Or, why didn't I get the part, why did the director want that girl over me? I've done some soul-searching the past few years, and if you think that you're at the center of the universe and you can control everything, then good luck. You're just not. We think we're very much in control of things in our lives, but I don't think we're in control of everything. We make choices that lead us down certain paths.

What else have you gained from the experience of creating your own show?
Pushing through fear is the biggest thing I've learned. There's something really scary about doing something like this, because you don't know if you're going to pull it off. What if I don't choose the right song? What if someone reviews it and they hate me? What if no one comes? What if everyone comes and you suck? There's so much fear instead of just going, "Let's do it." It's a personal goal for me to be able to push through the fear of saying "I'm not a writer, I only say other people's words, I have no business writing this." If it was up to me, I would have written original music. But then we would be having this conversation three years from now.
I've put it off for so long because of the perfectionist in me. It has to be a certain way. But if you keep putting that as a wall, you don't realize how strong you are, and the negativity really does a number on you. It makes you think you're not capable of achieving certain things. How 'bout, you don't have to do it yourself? You can bring in someone and you can take the ride together. So I learned about compromise.

What show was it in high school that you wanted the lead in?
West Side Story. I wanted to be Maria so bad. I turned down [the part I was offered, Anita]. That's another thing: What high school kid turns down a part? I look back and I'm like, What was I thinking? One of the best parts in musical theater! People would kill to be Anita. I was so hell-bent in my mind that I said it's either this or nothing. That kind of rambunctious attitude I had was the same attitude that got me in trouble, but it's also the same attitude that got me out.

Are there solo autobiographical shows from the past that were a model or inspiration for you?
My favorite, which is not autobiographical, is Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe. That's the pinnacle: something that's about real people, but it's not about her, and it's a statement about the world. Of course I loved Elaine Stritch. All of Anna Deavere Smith's stuff is great—again, not autobiographical. Gilda Radner's Gilda Live. Whoopi Goldberg, of course. But Lily Tomlin kind of really sparked it for me, as far as, How can someone fill this amount of time and capture an audience's attention and be a storyteller? 'Cause I'm not a stand-up. I'm a storyteller. My thing is being characters and telling stories about people. Why am I character actress? Because I love people. I could sit and watch people all day. I find the most normal people fascinating.

Tell us more about what we'll see and hear in Beautiful Disaster.
I play all the people in the show. I have a four-piece band and two backup singers. It's not original music. We go from Stevie Nicks to Survivor to Irving Berlin to Stephen Sondheim, West Side Story.
I did not want to write necessarily a story about my life, and this is where Randy comes in brilliantly—it's not all narrative. The other characters tell the story too. So it's not all like, "And next...," "And then...," because that gets boring. We have recurring characters, like the Spanish teacher. You learn a lot about me and about the school and about the time through her. My mother is another recurring character.

Is there anything in the show that might upset your parents?
Yeah, definitely. We're still dealing with the Do I invite my mother? question. I want to be considerate of my mother. I certainly don't make her look bad. I tell the truth, but it's my truth and my life and what I observed. People are going to love her in the show, because I wanted her to get her glory. My mother's like a gay icon in this show. We make her fabulous—and she is fabulous. But there were a lot of very painful things going on. Rather than embarrassing her, I'd say we bring painful memories back. And I don't think she needs to go through that. My dad is not coming...I didn't tell him I was doing this. If we were to do this again somewhere, then I would invite them. But for this, I'm already under enough pressure just writing and just doing something like this. [It's] not even stuff I say about them, just stuff that I did. I was stealing, I was doing a lot of things they didn't know about at the time. Both my parents come out smelling like roses in this. I wanted everything to wrap up in the end in a good way.  

How did you select the backup singers for your show?
It's hard to find backup singers. I wouldn't ask any of my friends to sing backup for me—it's kind of weird. The two girls we have: Hilaire, she's just out of Baldwin-Wallace College, and Hannah, my boyfriend's worked with her. They're very young and very talented, and they want exposure and need exposure. We consulted a casting director, Michael Cassara, and he recommended some.

And who is your boyfriend, who's also the musical director of your show?
Vadim Feichtner. He was the music director for Spelling Bee on Broadway. We met at NYU when he was a grad student there and I was working on their thesis projects. We didn't date until 2½ years ago.

Is this the first time you've worked together while you've been a couple?
We did a show together last summer, The Memory Show up in Massachusetts. We have a great working relationship. We know each other's sensibilities. And if we get flustered with each other, we know how to deal with that too.

You are aware you now have a fan base, aren't you?
Throughout the years I've gotten letters sent to the theaters. I started realizing I had a lot more fans, or people who know who I am, when I started getting stopped in the street and in restaurants. The other night, we got a free dessert. We were in a brand-new restaurant, and they sent it over and said, "This is from Riff-Tina." I do this character Riff-Tina on YouTube. We found out that when the hostess went to college, all of the students in her class always watched me on YouTube, so she recognized me when I came in.

Have you always done impressions?
Mm-hm. I was always funny, I was always a ham. My father's very funny—he's got, like, a natural rhythm for comedy, and I kinda picked it up from him. Then, back when I was growing up, there was a lot of really good television: Carol Burnett, Saturday Night Live when Phil Hartman was still around, In Living Color. I was always watching comedy shows. And I had a knack for voices. I used to do radio shows in my room, do all different voices.

What do you consider your premier impression?
Liza, probably, is the best one I have. That's—what do they say?—my wheelhouse. I've been doing that for 10 years. I met her, and ever since, I've done impersonations of her. She came to see me in Funny Girl, and we went out for drinks afterward...a whole hour of sitting and talking. I remember that like it was yesterday. When you're one-on-one, you really get a sense of a person.

You obviously have an affinity for comedy. Would you like to do more drama?
My dream is to do a role that combines both. There are certain shows I would love to do that combine both. I think that as I get older, I'm just coming into my type, and I think I'll have more opportunities—someone like me, character-wise.

What's next for you after Joe's Pub?
I'm going up to Barrington Stage to do Guys and Dolls. I'll be Adelaide.

Photos of Leslie, from top: two publicity pics for Beautiful Disaster, opening Sunday at Joe's Pub; with Vanessa Williams and Barbara Cook in Sondheim on Sondheim; with Doug Kreeger in Rooms; with Faith Prince in A Catered Affair. [Photo credit: Matthew Murphy (2); Joan Marcus; Carol Rosegg; Jim Cox]