GYPSY OF THE MONTH: Renée Klapmeyer of 'The Producers'

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 Renee 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 Renee 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."

She had received the best coaching possible on playing Ulla even before she was slated to take over the part on tour. "When we were in Boston teching the show before it opened, the girl that was playing Ulla was still on Broadway covering Cady [Huffman], so I got to step in during tech and work with Susan Stroman. I was lucky, because I could bring my own things to it but she gave me a lot of instruction on what she wanted from the role," Klapmeyer reports. "The direction I got from her was to play it very innocent and sweet. It was almost like she wanted me to not be so knowing about a line, and it could get a better laugh. 'You hung up your coat while you were still in it' [what Ulla says when she finds Leo hiding from the cops]. I think I was saying it like 'Oh, my gosh! I can't believe you did that,' where she wanted me to be like 'Omigod, what are you doing?' He's not an idiot; just say it like you have no idea [why that happened]."

Thanks to Stroman, Klapmeyer is one of the dancers in the Producers movie, due out Dec. 21. Not only is she making her film debut in a big holiday release, she should be noticed in it: She's the first "babe" to jump out of a file cabinet in Matthew Broderick's number "I Wanna Be a Producer" (known backstage as "Producer Babes"). She's also in the Little Old Lady Land number with Nathan Lane, which was filmed in Central Park.

All of which gave Klapmeyer a lot to brag about-if she were so inclined-when she returned to her hometown, Stillwell, Kansas, for her 10-year high school reunion this summer. Classmates knew she'd performed on Broadway, though their understanding of the theater business wasn't exactly accurate. "They were like: You probably don't have to audition for Broadway anymore; you probably just call up and say 'I want to play that role,'" she laughs.

While she was home for the reunion, she went through her old yearbooks in her parents' house and found a memory book from senior year in which she had filled in information about her life and current events at the time. "There's a section about what's your goal, what do you want to be, where do you see yourself in 10 years, and I had written 'I hope I'm in a Broadway show.'" It reminded her that she's come far fast. "Now I think about my career and it's: I want my own role on Broadway, I want to be doing television and film. But growing up I remember being: If I could do anything in a Broadway show...just walk across the stage... My career has definitely gone above and beyond what I thought it'd be."

As a child and teen, Klapmeyer sang and danced wherever she could, including the shows at the Worlds of Fun theme park-her first professional performing job-and at theaters and events throughout the Kansas City area as a member of the Miller Marley Entertainers. (One of her fellow troupe members, Shannon Durig, is currently playing Tracy in Hairspray.) When it was time to start applying to colleges, Klapmeyer knew she wanted to go to a university with a musical theater program, but the guidance counselors at her high school had a more limited perspective. "All of our counselors were like, 'Okay, KU or K State.' So my parents hired a college consultant, and she helped me find schools."

Auditioning for NYU took her to New York for the first time in her life. "I stayed with a friend and he just kind of let me go out on my own, and I loved it. It was awesome! We went to Beauty and the Beast, $15 standing-room-only tickets. I remember that night after I saw the show, I was in the middle of Times Square and I called my mom from a pay phone, collect, and I was like: 'I'm not coming home, I'm staying here.'

"Nowadays," adds Klapmeyer, "I'm like: Get me out of Times Square! There are so many tourists! But 17 years old, with all the lights, all the people... Watching the show and being in the city, I just felt it: This is what I have to be doing. I need to be here."

She ultimately enrolled not in NYU but in Connecticut's University of Hartford. By the time she graduated from its Hartt School of Music four years later, she already had her Equity card, having appeared in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at Maine State Music Theatre and Victor/Victoria and Sweet Charity at the North Shore Music Theatre in Massachusetts. Her first job out of college was in Atlantic City, where she costarred for three months in a 1930s revue called "Club Indigo" at the Trump Taj Mahal.

She has tried to get into Beauty and the Beast, the first show she saw on Broadway and still her favorite. But "it was a really bad audition," she says. "I sang the wrong song for it. I think they were looking for big soprano, and I went in and sang a belty song." Klapmeyer has been auditioning for TV too. She recently was a finalist for the "dumb blonde" part in a film noir-style commercial for the allergy medication Flonase. And you may have seen her in a commercial for Lucille Roberts health clubs, boasting that she lost 10 pounds by going there (not true). She's also appeared on the soap opera Guiding Light as a restaurant customer and a date in a jacuzzi.

A few years ago, before she got her break as a performer, when she was still in Amsterdam Billiards' employ and had to eat cheap, Klapmeyer used to order Chinese food ("steamed chicken and vegetables") a lot. The night before her 42nd Street audition, a fortune cookie told her, "A job promotion is in your future." She still has that fortune, framed, in a scrapbook.

Renee is at far right in the photo with some of Broadway's other "Producer Babes."