If you’ve ever lingered outside a stage door hoping for a post-show autograph from your favorite Broadway star, you’ll have some insight into the main characters in Ana Nogueira’s Which Way to the Stage, the breezy and biting new comedy that just opened off-Broadway at MCC Theater.
But unless you’ve engaged in at least one passionate, preferably public, debate over who was the best Mama Rose, the play’s innumerable theatrical references might fly right over your head straight into the mezzanine.
Realtor/actress Judy—played by Significant Other breakout Sas Goldberg, a comic dynamo whose biggest flaw is looking good in the “f**ing unflattering” jeans that her character keeps complaining about—is Team Bernadette; meanwhile, her actor BFF Jeff (Max Jenkins, of the Netflix original series Special) is firmly pro-Patti. And Imelda? Feh. “Like a caricature of a caricature of a performance by my mother in the Temple Beth Israel talent show,” sniffs Judy. This perfectly reasonable discussion is happening at the stage door of the Richard Rodgers Theatre in 2015, as they await an appearance (and a signature) from their idol, Idina Menzel, who’s starring in If/Then. To get an idea of just how much they revere Rent’s original Maureen, Wicked’s gravity-defying, Tony-winning Elphaba, and the artist forever known as Adele Dazeem thanks to an infamous John Travolta teleprompter snub, note that her name is spoken only once in the entire 120-minute play. The Tony-winning actress is always ”she” or “her.”
And when finance bro–turned–aspiring actor Mark (Evan Todd) walks into Judy’s life, he’s so dashing that she’s willing to overlook the fact that he’s never seen her live on stage. “Like for me, it’s more about seeing the show,” he shrugs. “And as long as the person in it is doing their job? I don’t reeeallly care if I’m not seeing the ‘star.’” He also doesn’t know who Jerry Orbach is—which comes up when Jeff and Judy are extolling the virtues of the “completely different,” “grittier and weirder,” “sexier” original production of Chicago. (Apparently Mark is the only actor in New York who’s never watched an episode of the original Law & Order.) “F**k boy straight musical theater guys,” a fellow auditioning actress (Michelle Veintimilla) says to Judy, referring to Mark. “I swear to god someone just tell me what it takes to get one of them to pay attention to you past one drink at Glass House.” Now that is an inside-baseball reference if there ever was one.
So the play isn’t all about Idina. It’s also about the often lampooned but rarely explored bond between straight women and gay men; the difficulties of making it as an actor in New York; and—this is a can of worms—who has a right to play which roles…mostly on stage, but also in life. (And that’s a lot to pack into 110 minutes.) Jeff does drag because “those women are written by men like me who weren’t allowed to write about themselves, who weren’t allowed to talk about what they were going through,” he explains. “So they put their experience into…Mama Rose and Dolly Levi and Fraulein Sally Bowles! and all these unseen, tossed out, disrespected women.”
Judy doesn’t see why Jeff wants to—or needs to, or has to—play those roles, especially when they’re supposedly written for her and she can’t get near them. And Mark wants to play whatever role is most convenient for him—onstage and offstage. “I—I don’t really like labels,” he avers. And who hasn’t heard that before? Seriously: The next time a guy at Glass House drops that line, throw your vodka stinger in his face, and—as Bernadette once sang—move on.
Which Way to the Stage opened May 10, 2022, at MCC Theater’s Newman Mills Theater and runs through May 22. Tickets and information: mcctheater.org
