Jane Krakowski has never been in a Broadway production of Chicago, as much as Broadway fans may wish for it. And yet, her flashy number in this season of Schmigadoon!, inspired by the seedy, fishnet world created by Bob Fosse, John Kander, and Fred Ebb, was a bit of a full-circle moment. “Those were the musicals—when I was, eight, nine years old and coming to see every Broadway show with my parents, dreaming of possibly doing that at some point—that influenced me so much,” Krakowski says of the gritty 1960s and ’70s musicals lovingly parodied in this season of the Apple TV+ series.
She remembers sitting wide-eyed and mesmerized at the original 1975 production of Chicago starring Chita Rivera and Gwen Verdon, but it wasn’t until the 1996 Encores! revival at City Center that she put it all together. “I realized that those were the women that influenced me,” she says. “All of those shows where women were sexy and used dance as their vocabulary and weren’t ingenues. Women singing alto roles and using their sexuality intelligently to get what they wanted, on their own two feet—or in their own two character shoes—that was the first time I felt there were women more like me who could be leads in musicals.”
This season of the wonderfully silly Schmigadoon!, called Schmicago, gave Krakowski a unique, clever entry point into the razzle-dazzle. While the first season parodied hokey Golden Age musicals like Oklahoma! and The Music Man and saw her in a small but memorable role as an evil baroness, the series’ return set its sights on the later decades’ darker, sexier shows—think Cabaret and Sweet Charity in addition to Chicago. She wouldn’t be taking on either of Chicago’s scintillating sinners, Roxie or Velma, but rather the musical’s sleazy lawyer, now gender-swapped and renamed Bobbie Flanagan. Armed with the one-liners and double entendres the actor knows how to triple-sell, Krakowski gets the season’s flashiest number: an all-out courtroom aria titled “Bells and Whistles,” where she pulls out all the stops to win her client’s case.
Krakowski is one of many returning cast members from the first season of Schmigadoon!, including straight-faced leads Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key. In a neat echoing of high school drama kids waiting for casting sheets to be posted on a bulletin board, Krakowski says the cast didn’t know whom they would be playing, or what the script even entailed, until not too long before shooting began. “I was like, Could I still be [Cabaret’s] Sally Bowles?” Krakowski says with a laugh. “[I figured] I might be in Chicago, but I thought I’d be a Roxie or Velma type. I had never seen Bobbie Flanagan coming.” Appropriate for a project as heavily influenced by theater as this one, the season was shot at a breakneck pace, with Krakowski often consulting showrunner Cinco Paul and choreographer Chris Gattelli to make character decisions almost on the fly. (“I think it helps when you have an innate understanding of the musical we’re covering or the moment in the musical we’re covering.”)
For those who know her only as 30 Rock’s meme queen Jenna Maroney, or for her roles in Ally McBeal or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Krakowski is a bona fide stage superstar. The Museum of Broadway displays her roller skates from her 1987 debut, in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s baldly preposterous Starlight Express, directly under Patti LuPone’s Evita wig. Growing up in a family of community theater aficionados in New Jersey, she started dancing at three years old, took her first Broadway bows at 18, and never stopped booking. She hit her breakthrough in 2003, in the first revival of Nine, one of the very shows full of sex and shadows she’d grown up adoring. Flying in from the ceiling, belting half naked on aerial silks, won her a Tony for best featured actress, and playing Guys and Dolls showgirl Adelaide in London’s West End won her an Olivier just three years later.
For the most part, her best-known projects have found a way to incorporate her full-throated performance skills. (If a Jane Krakowski character can’t break out into “The Music and the Mirror,” what’s the point?) Krakowski has relished those opportunities, and feels drawn to the sense of community in theater, down to hyping up her Schmigadoon! castmates’ performances on their group chat whenever their big numbers air. As a pandemic production, the first season was not exactly the return of Broadway, but it was maybe as close as anyone could come. As Krakowski puts it, “There was no live theater, but here was this little gem of a piece that came along…and we were suddenly able to get to live in that heightened reality of musical theater, and our audience had a place to go and watch it.”
Juan A. Ramirez
Source link
