Somewhere over the rainbow
Issue #25
Saturday Night Live alum Ana Gasteyer fights the Man in Wicked and beyond
By Amber Drea
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 4:30pm
There is life after Saturday Night Live and it doesn’t always involve bad movies starring Queen Latifah. Ana Gasteyer, who alongside Molly Shannon and Cheri Oteri contributed to the elevation of women’s roles in comedy, starred as a cast member on the 30-year-old, male-dominated sketch-comedy show from 1996 to 2002. Her more memorable characters include Lilith Fair folk singer-comedian Cinder Calhoun, music teacher Bobbi Moughan-Culp (with Will Ferrell), and NPR talk-show host Margaret Jo McCullin (Schweaty balls, anyone?) as well as parodies of Céline Dion, Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart, and other divas. Her specialty was singing, so it’s no surprise that she’s channeled all her energy into the more versatile (and healthy) field of musical theater.
Since leaving SNL, Gasteyer has performed in The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway, Funny Girl in Pittsburgh, and the updated musical version of the 1936 classic film Reefer Madness. However, with a 3-year-old daughter and a rigorous schedule as the lead in Chicago’s run of Wicked, the musical based on Gregory Maguire’s fictional biography about the Wicked Witch of the West (named Elphaba), she has little time to have any kind of madness, including coffee or liquor. During her interview with Venus, Gasteyer indulges in some Vietnamese-style coffee and a Japanese omelet before Wicked’s Sunday afternoon performance.
You saw Wicked on Broadway before reading the book. What did you think of the novel?
I love it. It’s different. Especially if you’ve already seen the musical, you have to sort of suspend your relationship to the musical because the musical’s a lot cheesier, basically. It ends happy. [Maguire] works to sort of establish why Elphaba descends into all the things she descends into, madness and death and all that, so it’s a lot darker. And the thing I really liked about [the book], actually, is there’s this really interesting metaphorical discussion about organized religion, which is a passion to me. It’s all in Ozian terms. [Elphaba’s sister] Nessa is this really strict, basically old-school Puritan, and then there are animists in the culture, besides the animal thing. There’s a capital A and a small a in the book — animals that have ascended into speaking consciousness and animals that are kept kind of base. And Elphaba’s like a terrorist in the book. She goes completely underground; obviously they couldn’t really do that in the musical. Not as cheerful.
How did you get the lead role in a high-profile musical after being a cast member in the most successful sketch-comedy show on television?
I had to work just as hard to get Wicked as I did to get Saturday Night Live because Elphaba is the most demanding singing role on Broadway. And I think people always thought I was a singer, but there’s something of an assumption that the celebrity’s gonna be a little bit of a lightweight. It’s funny, all the things you think can get you into a room in some ways make it harder to win a job because everybody thinks you’re Christina Applegate or whoever — no disrespect. But I’ve been at it since I was on SNL.
My first year I started auditioning for Williamstown and that takes a long time. It’s a very kind of exclusive world, the Broadway, theater, and musical world. So I started doing plays when I left the show. I started getting to know musical directors, and I’d done a lot of workshops, because every musical has 400 workshops before they get done, and that’s actually where I met Steven Oremus, who is our music supervisor in New York. In some ways, it was this long journey. And by that point, I had auditioned for a workshop of Wicked while I was still on SNL, so originally I had kind of been in the mix for it, and it didn’t happen for a million different reasons, and I was still on [SNL]. And then when I went to see it, I was like, “Oh yeah, I want to replace Idina [Menzel, who played Elphaba in the original cast].” And I just started focusing on it, and when Kristen Chenoweth left [the part of Glinda], I literally picked up the phone and said, “When’s Idina leaving? When’s her contract up? I gotta know.”
So at that point, I started concentrating on it and learning the music and working with my teacher. Then of course the audition came, and I was literally shaking. Because it’s just high belting, you sing so at the top of your register when you first learn the music, I don’t even know how to describe it. It’s like that therapy when you yell a lot. (Laughs) I was just sort of spent, you know. And then that didn’t happen, and they had me on hold forever and ever, and then they offered me Chicago.
Were you excited about that?
I was, for a number of reasons. Number one: Replacing sucks on Broadway because you get, like, 10 days, you’re not integrated into the company, they just sort of plop you amongst a pre-existing company with its own energy and its own vibe. At first it feels like temp work a little bit. (Laughs) The pressure’s different there and it was just after the holidays and they had a lot of changes. I mean, there’s just so many levels on which this was a better thing to have done. It’s a brand-new company, all creating its identity together, and that really turned out to be such a bigger gift than I can ever express. We’re this very — this is gonna sound pompous — but actorly bunch of musical people. There’s this kind of attitude about playing at the show and not just American Idol-izing it. Nobody riffs, nobody’s interested in singing any better than what’s appropriate to the song that’s being sung.
A lot of times on Broadway, there’s this kind of showman thing that happens that you’re like, “I don’t know what I’m watching anymore. I’m just watching somebody riffing. I’m not watching somebody telling a story.” I say that harshly because I can’t really riff, but also (laughs) because I think it’s distracting a bit. And I felt like there’s no pressure to be like that at all. And also, Chicago’s loving the show, on a different level almost than they love it in New York. We also benefited from the two productions that preceded us so much in terms of blocking, in terms of set things. Like my dress, at the very, very end, when I walk off into the sunset, [costume designer Susan Hilferty has] never been able to master that dress. She was like, “I finally have a dress that I like.” So things like that everybody kind of revisited and said, “Wow, let’s get rid of that and put this in instead.” Just little tweaks.
How do you feel about the cast?
I feel so lucky. Kate Reinders [who plays Glinda] and I study with the same voice teacher, by coincidence. She’s 25 — I’m 13 years older than her — and I was like, “Oh my god, this is the weirdest fit ever.” And my voice teacher said, “Trust me, you guys are so similar, I can’t even tell you, your energies are so similar.” And we do — she is so easy to connect with onstage, and musical-theater performers aren’t always. A lot of your job ends up being kind of figuring out how to manufacture the emotions that you’re supposed to have about this person, and with Kate it’s just there, because she really listens as an actor, and she really pays attention, and it’s so fun being onstage with her. And she’s also got the same level of fuck-around-ness that I do. We’re really bad, like when our mics are off (laughs), we basically have a two-hour-and-40-minute [equivalent of a] 15-minute conversation, one sentence at a time, throughout the show. Like she doesn’t get too upset about that stuff. The other day, she said, “Oh, I’m so bloated from the dinner I had,” and I said, “Your mic’s on.”
Is it hard to sing directly into the eyes of the other actors so much?
Actually, it’s a choice. No, it’s easier, because ordinarily, the Broadway way, they turn out and they sell it. Thankfully, Joe Mantello’s not your garden-variety musical-theater director, so he doesn’t care. He would rather have the people interacting onstage and have the story be told than to have the whiz-bang. To me, you can’t sing “For Good” facing away from each other. That’s crazy to me. It feels unnatural.
So after this, do you want to keep focusing on musicals or stage acting?
I always get that question. And I definitely have made it a concerted effort to become established in the stage world. Theater’s not easy to break into, as I’ve said, and it’s a real home for me now. I’ve done three off-Broadway shows, and I’ve done regional, and I’ve done workshops, and I’ve done recordings, and I’ve done all this stuff now that I’m starting to fill up my resume. Definitely a goal of Wicked was so people in casting meetings weren’t like, “Oh yeah, she’s really funny and she can sing pretty well.” You know, once somebody knows you can sing Elphaba, it’s like being able to sing Evita — people shut up about it already. Although some reviewers hammer my voice — they don’t hammer it, but it’s hard. But at the end of the day, somebody who knows this music knows if you can sing the score, it’s not really like an issue anymore. But I’m also — look, Mercury’s in retrograde so I’m starting to review back — I’m also not as interested in doing things to prove things anymore. I want to just do them because I enjoy them. So, yes, I really love stage work is the answer. I love the discipline, and I love the routine, and I love the craftsmanship. It’s really different than my history. I started out as an improviser, a sort of lucky, sloppy girl who was always pulling it off. I’m good at the last minute, I wrote my papers in high school the night before. And I’ve reached this point in my life where I’m much more interested in sculpting something and making it better every night and refining it, and I love that about theater. I also love the fact that it’s so physical and draining — it basically shuts my brain up.
What was the hardest part about being on Saturday Night Live?
The crazy vampire life. (Laughs) No, it wasn’t. For me personally, the hardest part for me was navigating the social and political subsystem, which has been very well documented over the years. And that’s not to say it’s not a healthier place than it used to be because it is, but I’m very feminine. I’m very empathic, I worry about how everybody feels, I worry about how everybody perceives me, and I’m almost incapable of shutting that part of my brain out. And the show is, not in a negative way, very competitive. It’s structured in a very masculine, competitive form. It’s organized around people who are successful competitors. And I’m not saying I’m not competitive. I am, I can compete, but I hate it, and I hate the anxiety that surrounds it, and I hate the feelings and the emotional fallout from it, both for myself and my peers, and so I didn’t enjoy that — it was destructive for me over time. It was just a bad fit, amongst other things.
I love theater, or any other job once you leave the show. Everybody has their position, their role, it’s done. There’s nothing negotiable about it. Every week [at SNL] the sand shifts beneath you because you can have eight scenes one week and none the next. Different people gain authority at different times in different ways at the show. It’s very complex that way, and it’s set up because that’s how you write a live show every week. So that was far and away the hardest thing. I had to work really hard to figure that out. On the other hand, I have some really close friends as a result. People don’t talk about that a lot because Molly, Cheri, and I were first to be the women who bust out and all that stuff. And a lot of that was just culture and timing and people being ready for it.
What’s your favorite character from the show?
I don’t know anymore. I grow fonder of them the farther I am away from all of them. There are a lot of weird little ones we did that were really fun. There’s this Diana Ross parody that we did, this girl named Deandra Wells who was really just a terrible bitch to her band, but would always talk about love. I loved doing that one. I loved doing the music teachers, of course, because I just love working with Will [Ferrell] and Paula Pell, who we wrote it with. I’m not very good at doing things I don’t enjoy, so I really liked everything I played on some level.
Were you disappointed that you didn’t get to do Martha Stewart going to jail?
I felt so lucky that I didn’t have to do that. There’s a point on SNL that after a while, you’re just like, “This is mean, man.” It’s sort of bad karma or something. And I was kind of glad that I missed [playing Martha in jail] because there were a lot of times that I felt really bad about what we were doing about her anyway on the show. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I think she’s crazy, and it was fun to do it, but mostly it was just the humanness that I found funny. I auditioned [for SNL] with her, and what I found funny was the paradoxical thing that she does where she’s really, really stiff and sort of masculine at the same time as presenting these really warm things, and her onscreen awkwardness for being a domestic goddess is what I found really compelling. … And eventually [SNL] sort of assaults people for the sake of it, and I think it’s gross.
Why do you think there are “best-ofs” for only two female cast members — Molly Shannon and Gilda Radner (which is only available on VHS)? Is it because some men don’t think women are funny?
I don’t know about that. Obviously, and I don’t know what this says, but gay men think I’m funny. It’s a weird world. I’ve given this a lot of thought. There’s always been this defensiveness where we’ve protected SNL from being a sexist work environment. I can’t speak for the other people that have been before us, but it was great for me. I certainly didn’t feel held back for being a woman there. It’s the competitive thing, and women who succeed in comedy are very good at playing that game where we excel at a kind of linear competitive structure, whether or not we enjoy it. And some people thrive on it. And the movie system is set up just the same. I think it comes down to values though, as much as I think about this. There are no $20 million female comedy stars; there are not women at the centerpieces of movies who are goofy and who aren’t sexy. The only women who are exalted that way are the ones men think they can fuck because it puts them down where they need to go again. Of course, over beers and stuff, I’ve gotten my dander up and thought, “I’m gonna go write the movie that has the girl at the center,” but the truth is, I don’t want to. It’s too much work. I want to be with my family and my friends. I don’t really care about that. It’s no fun to be on the vanguard. You don’t get any credit.
How was guest-hosting The Late Late Show after Craig Kilborn quit?
That was really interesting — speaking to feminism again — there are no women in late-night. My husband made me do it, and I was like, “I’m not gonna do it, it’s gonna piss me off, it’s not gonna be fun.” I don’t want to host a late-night talk show. And [the producers] said, “It’s kind of an audition, so you have to want to do it.” And I said, “I don’t want to do it.” And the producer said, “If there’s a 3% chance you would find it interesting, please come.” Because I think basically they needed women, but unfortunately it turned into this whole dialogue about me being a woman. It was just stupid. I didn’t enjoy it. It’s a really aggressive form. There are very little feelings and nurturing. I’m just tired of being ashamed of those things as attributes. I think they’re good things. You see evidence of it. I did Rosie [O’Donnell]’s show, and whatever you want to say about that show and what it turned into, people liked it because she got real about stuff. She related and talked to you about your family and talked to you about your crushes. When you would be interviewed as a guest, they preplan everything you say on these shows — what a revelation — and [their segment producers] were always like, “Did you ever dye your hair weird colors in high school?” Stuff that was fun and real and human. By comparison, when you go on those boy late-night talk shows, literally they’re like, “What are your funny stories? What are your jokes?” It’s such a different energy, as opposed to organically coming up with something together. And I don’t want to make a sweeping generalization again, but it’s not unnoticeable that women succeed at daytime and men succeed at night.
Women still have a way to go.
It will happen, it will happen while we’re alive. It’s just that for the moment, it’s not in our thing. I kind of got so tired just thinking about the whole thing that I — and I’m a raging feminist — I kind of just let it go. My agents were like, “Move to L.A., we gotta get you in the movies,” but let’s face it, [most of] the roles in movies are these adorable girlfriends reacting to the funny guy, or old Battle ax McGee, who quite honestly I wasn’t ready to play yet. And I’m standing on 42nd Street, and Wonderful Town’s down the street and Wicked’s up the street and I’m like, “Shit, I’m staying in New York and doing theater.” I wanna do work which is good and interesting and compelling and fun. And Elphaba’s funny, Elphaba’s not a complete dud, so I’d rather do that and be a better artist at the end of it rather than fighting some uphill battle in Hollywood.
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