Interview: Kate Baldwin on Exploring Different Sides of Herself in New Feinstein's/54 Below Show and the 'Full Circle' of Working with Bette Midler

This spring, Kate Baldwin will appear in one of the most highly anticipated shows of the season, the Bette Midler-starring revival of HELLO, DOLLY! Baldwin will once again be portraying the fun-loving and yearning Irene Molloy, a role which she had previously taken on at the Paper Mill Playhouse a decade ago.

Prior to stepping back into Molloy's shoes, though, Baldwin will return to Feinstein's/54 Below to perform a brand new solo show, EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE, singing the songs of some of her favorite artists. Busy as she is, BroadwayWorld had a chance to chat with Baldwin ahead of her four-show engagement at the cabaret venue, the first of which kicks off on October 25. Baldwin, sincerely affable and reflective, shared the "full circle" nature of costarring alongside Bette Midler (she may have once made the ill-advised decision to sing "The Rose" at a middle school talent show), how she uses her solo concerts to introspect her life and career, and why she, like many others surely, often asks herself, "What would Gavin Creel do?"

This interview has been edited for content and length.

---

CM: You have performed at Feinstein's/54 Below before, but this is an entirely new show, correct?

KB: Right, I did a show there about two years ago in the springtime, and it was a show I put together with my friend and music director Georgia Stitt. It was all primarily musical theatre songs, and the title of it was SING PRETTY, DON'T FALL DOWN. It was sort of stories about how I've made mistakes in my career or my life and recovered from them. And then [it was] songs that are from musical theatre, from shows that I've done, songs from BIG FISH, FINIAN'S RAINBOW, that kind of thing.

This show is completely different. It's called EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE, which is a Fiona Apple song that I really like. I've been a Fiona Apple fan for most of my adult life; she spoke to my 1990s heart. So I took her song as inspiration for a title. The idea is kind of all the things you have to do, manage, deal with, juggle, when you are pursuing a career in theatre, and also raising a family, and also just navigating life in New York City--- especially in these turbulent times, as we face the election of the century.

CM: You've already started to answer this, but how do you go about establishing the overall arc and tone when putting together these solo shows?

KB: I know that there are people---and they're very smart people---who put together a show of these songs and stories, and then they take it around the country and they do it all over the place and it's always the same show. I am completely restless and the minute I create something and do it a couple of times, I go, "Okay, what's the next chapter?" I think the overall idea is, how do you evolve? I'm not the same person that I was when I was, for instance, doing FINIAN'S RAINBOW. That was seven years ago. My life has changed significantly since then, and, yes, I look back on that time and I love it and can remember it very fondly, but I've learned a lot since then. Part of putting together anything like this is getting to explore new sides of yourself and do something that scares you. I know it's so cliché and actors say that all the time, but it's more fun when there's a real challenge and you have to figure out how to do it.

[In EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE] I'm doing an Elvis Costello song, I'm doing a Loretta Lynn song--- These are songs that I listen to in my spare time, because I'm a huge pop music fan, but never dreamed that I could do a version of them for an audience that would care to hear me do that. But then, through working on them, I think I have figured out a way to do them so that I'll still be me, but doing songs from artists who I love. There's an Aretha Franklin song in there that scares the bejesus out of me, Ingrid Michaelson songs, a Mika song. Anybody who I've worked with knows whenever I'm in my dressing room before the show, I love playing high-spirited pop. "High-spirited," I sound like I am 85 years old, but an up-tempo pop song that's happy, usually sung by a skinny white boy. So I looked for those favorite songs that I could pull off in a 54 Below show.

CM: As an actor, is it daunting to get on stage and perform just as yourself, separate from any character?

KB: Always! It's the worst, it's the absolute worst! Because when you're an actor, you have a script. You have somebody else to write it for you and you have somebody else to write the jokes. Your job is to infuse it with truth and to find the part of yourself that can make what you're saying feel credible. That's like the over-generalized version of what acting is, right? So when you're up there in front of everybody and you're just supposed to be yourself, it's like, "Well, which version of myself should I be?" But really, how much does anybody really want to know? It has to be interesting, and my rule--- It's not my rule I stole it from Phyllis Diller. Her rule is, talk for two minutes and then have a joke. You can't go for longer than two minutes without having something funny to say.

Really, I spend as much time figuring out what I'm going to say as I do on what I'm going to sing. There are people who are improv masters. I am not that person, so I do need to write it all down and memorize it and make it seem like it's spontaneous. It's worked pretty well and it is spontaneous and fun, and I do know that people do want to hear the war stories of working in theatre, but this one is going to be more about life.

CM: Robbie Rozelle is directing these upcoming shows. How did the two of you come to work together?

KB: It's a good story, actually! I went and bought a single ticket to the Encores! presentation of THE MOST HAPPY FELLA, because I love that show so much and my friend Cheyenne [Jackson] was in it, and Laura Benanti was going to be playing Rosabella and is there a more perfect person to play Rosabella? I walked down the aisle to "My Heart is So Full of You." I love that score and I love that show and so I went to go see it and I bought a single ticket. I spent money on it. Even though I've done five Encores! I was like, "Oh, I'm Kate Baldwin, I'm going to buy a ticket!" So I sat in the center of, like, the tenth row, and someone right next to me goes, "Um, hi, I'm Robbie Rozelle. I worked on your two albums." So we just got to talking and, like the 85-year-old woman that I am, I pulled out a bag of M&Ms from my purse and as the lights were going down, I was like, "Would you like to share my M&Ms?" We shared M&Ms in the dark and cried over Laura Benanti singing. We just have such like-minded ideas about what a nightclub should be, we just have a similar sensibility, we make each other laugh. He is kind of the Broadway Diva Whisperer--- I'll say it!

CM: We need to discuss HELLO, DOLLY!, which you will be a part of when it opens on Broadway this spring. You have performed in it regionally, and now you will be in it on Broadway, so I'm wondering when the show first became important to you, or was it just when you started performing in it?

KB: I never saw it as a kid. It wasn't one of the shows that was on my radar. As a kid, I think my first productions were all of the Andrew Lloyd Webber spectacles of the mid-to-late '80s like STARLIGHT EXPRESS and PHANTOM OF THE OPERA, of course. That was my entry into theatre. It wasn't the tried and true golden age of theatre material. I didn't truly discover that kind of musical theatre until I got to college, and then I was like, "Oh yeah, Richard Rodgers writes the best melodies, and Oscar Hammerstein writes incredible lyrics." So I think after college I got a CD of JERRY'S GIRL which is a revue [of songs by Jerry Herman], and there were songs from MAME, there were songs from MACK AND MABEL, and, of course, songs from HELLO, DOLLY! They were so tuneful, so heartfelt. It's like the best of musical theatre. It's what musicals do best: heart on your sleeve and it's positive energy. And especially, the fact that so many of his shows have women at the center of them who are life forces. I know so many women who are like that in their every day existence, and that's a thing to celebrate.

I didn't really know HELLO, DOLLY! until my friend Mark Hoebee at the Paper Mill Playhouse offered me to do Irene Molloy, and that was, oh my God, 11 years ago. It was one of the first times I've ever been offered something and didn't have to audition. It's a great role, it's romantic, it's funny. She gets fabulous songs. The whole thing is just fun. It's a chance to be silly and also sincere, and I like both of those things.

CM: In what ways do you connect to your character, Irene?

KB: The thing about Irene is that she's looking to break out, she's looking to have fun. She's a widow and she's been trapped by society, really, and society's expectations of what widows do. She's not unlike Marian Paroo in THE MUSIC MAN. There's a society that's determined what her role should be, and she doesn't accept it and she wants to change it. Early on in the play, she says to Minnie, "The only way I can get out of this darn hat shop---I hate hats---is by marrying somebody. I'll marry whoever it is, just get me out of here. I want to go live life again." I can't think of a person who doesn't want to, in some respects, just sort of chuck it all and go dance in the street. We all want to do that, or maybe some version of that, like laying on the beach with a piña colada. I can relate to feeling that life offers constrictions and society is trying to tell you who you are. This goes back to why I keep changing up my solo act, because I don't really feel like being defined by a song or a role fits me so well. I want to show and explore the other side, so I think Irene and I have that in common.

CM: This entire cast is phenomenal, but I have to ask: How are you feeling about the fact that you'll be working with Bette Midler?

KB: You have to ask! Good, because I have two good stories. I've loved Bette Midler I think my entire life. When I was 13 years old, we did a talent show in my middle school and I chose to sing "The Rose." What did I know? What does anybody know about anything when they're 13 years old? I should've been singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop," but no, I was singing, "[Sings] Some say love, it is a river..." What the hell? Why was I singing that? I have no idea, but there's video. I'm in an aqua dress with a 1988 peplum around my dropped waist, and I have the side clip in my very red hair, and I have the microphone and I'm singing "The Rose." My parents played that record all the time. It was my dad's favorite song and I was just going to sing it because I'd heard it so much and I loved it, too. I didn't know anything about what any of it meant.

In college at Northwestern University, in musical theatre technique class, one of the exercises they had us do, I think the point of the exercise was to choose a larger-than-life persona. We were supposed to choose a song and lip-sync to it, and impersonate someone, so I chose Bette Midler. I did "The Glory of Love," so I do the song and I do her. I tease my hair up so it's really, really big and I wore an off-the-shoulder black beaded gown and I made them backlight me and I copied her hand gestures and copied her. I haven't told her this yet, and I'm going to meet her in like 10 days, so maybe I should tell her this before it appears in print. Or maybe it should just appear in print and she'll be like, "What's going on (laughs)?"

So I lip-synced as her when I was in college, and then when I was new to the city and it was the late '90s, casting directors were starting to ask for pop-rock songs, because people were being seen for RENT, not that I would ever be seen for RENT. My one RENT audition went terribly, but that was the sound that was starting to happen, and so I found this song that Bette Midler did called "The Song of Bernadette." Actually, Jennifer Warnes wrote it, but Bette Midler recorded it, and so I found that sheet music and I did that song as my sort of pop ballad for when I had to do that in auditions. Once again Bette Midler comes into my life. I've kind of gravitated to her all through growing up.

Oh, and two years ago, I was doing CAN-CAN at Paper Mill Playhouse, and I was La Mome Pistache, who is this free spirit and very wise and also has sort of no boundaries and there was a point at which I had to talk to the audience. I'm not the kind of person who can go ad-lib with the audience, so I would write myself instructions for, "Here are the lines when situation A happens and here are the lines for when situation B happens." And then I was thinking about who does this really well, and I watched Bette Midler, footage of her Vegas show, THE SHOWGIRL MUST GO ON, and it was just like, that's how you do it. So I sort of studied her and tried to use some of her essence to put into my characterization of La Mome Pistache.

It feels full circle and I feel kind of creepy that I can list all of [Midler's] things, and I have no idea how she'd react to that kind of list. I think I have to pick a moment. It's not going to be the first day! But I do want to take a moment where I can tell her all those things, because I don't know if it's weirder to hold onto that information or to share it. I'll go to my friend Gavin Creel [who is also in the cast] and say, "Tell me what I should do. Should I say these things? Should I say these things all at once?" Do you ever play that game of, "What would so and so do?" if they were in this situation? Right, what would Gavin Creel do?

CM: You have both originated roles as well as stepped into roles done before, some of which are very well-known. Can you talk about what's challenging and rewarding about both creating and recreating roles?

KB: Well, there is that thing where someone's in a musical and the role becomes so intertwined, interconnected, interwoven with their personality and who they are as a performer. Just last week, I was on this Playbill cruise ship with Chita Rivera. She created Anita in WEST SIDE STORY, she created the Spider Woman in KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN, which I saw when I was in high school. For me, there is no one else who can do that part. It is just so intertwined with who she is. It's so daunting and I don't know that I feel scared or like I should shy away from a role because somebody else did it first. I think most times when revivals happen, they happen again because it's good and usually the writing is really good. The material you have to work with is excellent, so why would I shy away from that just because somebody else has also done it and put their stamp on it?

I take solace in the idea that my version can't possibly be like anybody else's version. I have to come at it with my own sense of truth and my own sense of who she is. That is freeing in that way, but in the back of my mind--- There are people alive right now who saw Carol Channing and the production [of HELLO, DOLLY!] with Eileen Brennan who probably have their favorite moments, so I want to respect that and pay tribute to it if I can, but also forget about it and live in the moment and just be in the actual circumstances that we've created. It feels like being in a long line of history. In a strange way, I feel like I've been sucked into an historical moment. I'm in the line, and there will be an Irene Molloy after me. I feel a sense of honor about it.

---

Kate Baldwin will perform her show EXTRAORDINARY MACHINE at Feinstein's/54 Below on October 25-29. For tickets and reservations, visit www.54below.com.

To post a comment, you must register and login.