San Diego Union Tribune: Interview with Sutton Foster
By Welton Jones
November 2, 2000
Four weeks into rehearsal for "Thoroughly Modern Millie," everything seemed just fine to 25-year-old Sutton Foster. She was back in a city she loves, she had a job in a new musical she believed in and she'd even gotten to play the title role in rehearsal a couple of times.
Then, about noon one Friday, came "this really weird phone call." Director Michael Mayer told her the part was hers, if she wanted it. Show biz history may record her decision as the turning-point in her career, the show's career and even the careers of its creators, Dick Scanlan (book and lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music).
It's just possible that one of the theater's most creaky cliches - -the understudy who becomes a star -- is actually happening, right before the eyes of eight audiences a week at the La Jolla Playhouse's Mandell Weiss Theatre through Nov. 26.
"I'm doing OK now," the lanky, fresh-faced actress was saying a couple of days after opening night. "I'm calmed down. But it's been a whirlwind. I'm still getting into the part. It's a lot!"
Foster doesn't remember when she first saw the 1967 Julie Andrews- Mary Tyler Moore film about the Roaring 20s, the source of this new musical, but she always knew about it. And when she first heard the Broadway buzz about the project, she knew she had to be part of it.
"Because I loved the piece when I first auditioned for it and because I respected the way the creative staff believed in it," she explains. "I told my friends this could really be awesome."
Says Mayer now: "We were incredibly fortunate that Sutton made the decision to turn down some very lucrative work in `Les Miserables.' If she hadn't done that, I'm not sure where we would be now.
Erin Dilly, the actress originally cast as Millie, left the project by mutual agreement, one of those tough artistic decisions.
Foster was her understudy.
Wonderful friends
"I talked with Erin for an hour," Foster says. "I wanted to be sure she was OK. There's no animosity. She and I are really wonderful friends. We knew each other in Michigan, when I was 14."
As a girl in Augusta, Ga., Foster was hauled to dance class by a mother who thought all that energy needed an outlet. At the community theater tryouts for "Annie," 10-year-old Foster sang in public for the first time . . . and was cast as Annie.
General Motors moved her father often, so it was from Troy, Mich., that a 17-year-old Foster landed a chorus job in the national company of "The Will Rogers Follies" when she was still a high school senior.
"I always wanted to be a normal teen-ager," she confesses, so she enrolled at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh. "But I wasn't really ready to learn anything." She moved back in with her parents (in Tennessee by then), acted in a children's theater and waited tables for eight months before making the same move that Millie makes in the show:
To Manhattan.
She was in the original production of "The Scarlet Pimpernel." She joined the touring revival of "Grease" and eventually played the lead on Broadway. She was in the ensemble of "Les Miserables" and moved into the part of Eponine.
And she was cast in the 20th anniversary version of "Annie," appropriately enough as the "Star-to-Be."
For brief periods in both "Grease" and "Les Miz," she was reunited with her brother Hunter, an actor-author who at one point was up for the part of (Millie's love interest) Jimmy.
"We were asked to read together," says Foster, "and we were both like, `eeeuuue.' I don't think they realized."
Eventually, Foster had to win three auditions for Millie, the original read-through for backers, the workshop company and La Jolla.
This is her fifth trip to San Diego. In addition to Civic Theatre runs with "Will Rogers Follies," "Grease" and "Les Miz," she had a lead in a 1997 flop revue at the Old Globe, "What the World Needs Now."
"That was a big break for me," she says of the Globe show. "I got to create a leading lady role. You learn a lot from hits and misses."
When Foster agreed to take over as Millie, there were adjustments to be made, for her and for the rest of the company. For one thing, she's taller than most of her colleagues. At 5-foot-9, she has an inch on Jim Stanek, who won the part of Jimmy. And that's before she straps on 3-inch heels.
"He was self-conscious at first," says Foster, "and then I got self-conscious. I've always known I would have to struggle. I don't think I'm an amazon or anything. But I always have to play a guy: A soldier in 'Pimpernel,' a boy in `Les Miz,' the dogcatcher in `Annie' . . . "
It was Stanek, she says, who bailed her out.
"He said you always see couples in movies and plays where he's taller. But we're not. So our feelings for each other have to come from a deeper place."
Mayer says it was never a problem.
"I love her height! She's so fresh and real. That stuff is just cosmetic anyway. You only have to believe that she's from Kansas and she has this hunger to remake her life.
"Sutton is that kind of actor who can reveal what's going on under the surface. The more of Sutton we see, the more of Millie we see."
Everybody around the show seems to agree, on or off the record, that Foster's arrival in the title role was a big boost to the project, especially when Tesori and Scanlan got around to writing her big climactic song, "Gimme, Gimme," in which Millie decides to follow her heart.
Tesori labored at a piano rolled into the Mandell Weiss Theatre lobby during the day. Scanlan would take her piano tape and retreat to the light booth, where there was a computer. They finished just in time to teach Foster the song before it came due at one of the final technical rehearsals.
"It's a nice song," says Tesori, "written for her. Tailored, like a jacket, with the fabric, the colors, the pattern designed for her."
Adds Scanlan, "With another actor, `Gimme' could sound petulant. But she has such an instantaneously likable, expressive personality."
And Foster herself just says: "I have an audition song forever, now."
So what happens next?
While the company enjoys its success, the creative staff will take a few days off and then return to work. Of course everybody's talking Broadway, this season or next, but it's too soon to nail anything down. There might even be another out-of-town engagement.
Foster concentrates on filling out her role -- there's a reference in the play to Rudolf Valentino in "The Sheik," so she ordered up a copy and studies it with delight -- and not pondering too much the future.
"I guess I've been blessed," she says, with a refreshing sincerity. "I'm not after fame, success or money. I just want to be well-respected, to continue to work and to grow as an actor.
"I'm only contracted through the La Jolla run."
Frankly, she needn't worry, if her director's take means anything.
"I adore the girl," say Mayer. "For my money, she is Millie."