Sherie Rene Scott Gives Audiences "Everyday Rapture"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Interviews

Published on Wednesday, 30 June 2010 21:41

Written by Frank Lovece

She earned a Tony Award nomination for Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and originated the role of the sea witch Ursula in Broadway's The Little Mermaid. Yet Sherie Rene Scott still calls herself "a semi, semi semi-star" in her Tony- and Drama Desk-nominated semi, semi semi-autobiographical Broadway show Everyday Rapture, which runs through July 11, 2010, at the American Airlines Theatre.

Scott's not-quite one-woman-show, which earned equally rave reviews Off-Broadway last year, was a quickly slotted replacement for the Roundabout Theater Company's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, shuttered during rehearsals after co-star Megan Mullally pulled out. 

For Scott, 43, that became the kind of now-go-out-there-and-come-back-a-star break of which showbiz legends are made. After many theater roles including Amneris in Broadway's Aida and the title role in the Off-Broadway musical Debbie Does Dallas, she seems happily overwhelmed by all the attention she's getting for her show about, well, getting out there and trying to be a star -- even when you come from a Mennonite family.

Scott, who with husband Kurt Deutsch co-founded the Grammy Award-winning cast-recording label Sh-K-Boom Records (pronounced "shik-a-boom"), spoke in her backstage dressing room shortly before earning Tony Award nominations for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical and, as co-writer with Dick Scanlan, Best Book of a Musical.

Q: One reviewer, writing about the show's original Off-Broadway run, compared you favorably to Bette Midler as a "diva-as-trash-goddess." How does one take that?

SRS: One doesn't. (laughs) The word "diva," I don't even know what that means; I'm so not a diva. But I love that I've created this character who is a diva, and it's fun to play this character who happens to have my name, this character who I think is much less insightful than I like to think I am, and this character who is wrong in all the right ways -- that kind of foul, sexy, grungy [persona] that I am more interested in [playing] than some kind of, I don't know, ingénue part, I guess. Old ingénue!

Q: People call Everyday Rapture semi-autobiographical, but as you say, the show's Sherie is just a character. How much should we take as genuine? Are you really half-Mennonite --referring to the generally Amish-like religious group -- for instance?

SRS: In a way. A funny thing happened when [co-writer Dick Scanlan and I]  were writing. When I would write completely factual stories, everyone thought I was making them up. So what we were able to do is write stories that are really genuinely true, but are not necessarily factual.

Q: So about the half-Mennonite thing…?

SRS: That's true. My dad wasn't -- my mother married a non-Mennonite.

Q: So when she married a non-Mennonite, your mom was shunned?

SRS: Her whole family was almost shunned. [Her church] stopped shunning with my mother. Most Mennonites don't shun.

Q: Have any Mennonites complained about the show?

SRS: No; Mennonites love it.

Q: Mennonites come see Broadway shows?!

SRS: Oh, yeah. There are different levels. None of my family's been to see the show, though. They're not interested in theater; never were. But now my mom says she really wants to see me on The View; that's her dream. Barbara Walters did love the show, I have to say.

Q: This theater used to be the Selwyn back in the good ol' days of Times Square B-movies and peep shows. Do you remember that 42nd Street?

SRS: I would try not to walk down it. When I was in [the rock opera] Tommy [beginning in 1993], we used to trade stories about what heinous things were said or done to us on the way from the subway to the St. James Theatre. I remember we'd see baby carriages and think it was tantamount to child abuse! It was usually a crazy person carrying around a voodoo doll or something. 

A friend's mother came from Canada, and in-between shows she was going to go see a movie. And she wanted to go see that new Kevin Costner movie that was playing on 42nd Street: Dances with Foxes!

Q: (laughs) How long did it take her to find out it wasn't Dances with Wolves?

SRS: Not too long. At first she thought,  "This is New York -- maybe all movie theaters have people in raincoats with odd smells." I think it was very soon into the previews [that she caught on].

Q: In your show, one conceit is that Idina Menzel had actually replaced you in Wicked. That really happen?

SRS: No, I wasn't in Wicked.

Q: Was she okay with being a presence in your play?

SRS: She came to see it at [Off-Broadway's] Second Stage; she and [husband] Taye [Diggs], and they got a real big kick out of it.

Q: The whole Idina Menzel riff was a very funny bit. That and the one about strangling the cat.

SRS: Yes. Any kind of cat strangulation usually goes over well.

Everyday Rapture
American Airlines Theater
227 W. 42nd St
New York, New York 10036
(212) 719-1300
Runs through July 11, 2010

For more by Frank Lovece: FrankLovece.com

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