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Sunday, July 20, 2003

By Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

The onetime "Saturday Night Live" player mocked Martha Stewart's crisp cadence, Celine Dion's devolution into diva and Hillary Clinton's ability to stand by her cheating man. Now she's switching to another icon and outlet: Fanny Brice, on stage in "Funny Girl."

	Pittsburgh CLO's "Funny Girl" Where: Benedum Center, Downtown Starring: Ana Gasteyer, Robert Cuccioli, Diane Findlay When: Tuesday through Aug. 3; 8 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; and 1 p.m. July 24. Tickets: $12 to $44. 412-456-6666.

Ana Gasteyer is making her first trip to Pittsburgh to headline the Civic Light Opera's production of the musical that made Barbra Streisand a star (and later, an Oscar winner) and imprinted the songs "People" and "Don't Rain on My Parade" on our collective consciousness. Just hearing that first title is like punching a juke-box button that triggers, "People. People who need people, are the luckiest ..."

"I've spent the last seven years making fun of people who sing this kind of music, so for me, there's a great challenge in really taking it seriously and taking myself seriously doing it and enjoying myself doing it, and I really love it," Gasteyer said from her New York home.

In fall 2002, a one-time-only performance of "Funny Girl" featured 16 leading ladies, including the "SNL" star, Whoopi Goldberg, Sutton Foster, Ricki Lake, Kristin Chenoweth and Bebe Neuwirth. The New York show was a benefit for the Actors' Fund of America, and Gasteyer fell in love with the role of the comedian who rises from a gawky New York City girl to Ziegfeld Follies star.

As a comedian who sings, Gasteyer is accustomed to people suggesting roles for her. "People said for a long time, oh, when they remake 'Funny Girl,' it should be you. ... But I really hadn't taken it seriously. And then when I did that benefit and started really paying attention to it -- I had seen the movie a million years ago -- it was like, boy, I really should play this role. I'd love to play this role. It was definitely a character I can relate to."

When Gasteyer left "SNL" in summer 2002, she wanted to pursue musical theater and she calls this a baptism -- or, at the least, a refresher course.

The 36-year-old daughter of a potter and lawyer started as a music student before gravitating to improv comedy and theater. She joined the Los Angeles improv troupe "The Groundlings," emerged from the pack on "SNL," performed on Broadway in "The Rocky Horror Show" and squeezed in movies and TV appearances along the way. In fact, she's among the patrons told "No soup for you!" in the famous "Seinfeld" episode about the so-called "soup Nazi."

If anyone asks how Gasteyer is spending her summer vacation, the answer is easy: Since May, she's been preparing for "Funny Girl" and, from July 22 to Aug. 3, she will portray Fanny Brice opposite CLO favorite Robert Cuccioli as handsome gambler Nicky Arnstein, Diane Findlay as Fanny's mother and Tim Hartman as Florenz Ziegfeld.

"It's such a big role that I really tried to do whatever I could to come as prepared as possible. I know the CLO has an action-packed schedule, and there's really very little rehearsal there" for a role of this scope. That's why she has been rehearsing with Cuccioli in New York and honing her vocal and dance skills for weeks.

"There are literally four 11 o'clock numbers in this show. She sings, like, I should know this off hand, I can count for you, something really crazy, like 10 numbers," Gasteyer says before fetching her material and tallying 13 or 14 songs. "And they're big, fat ones." That's why she says, "The biggest challenge will be vocal stamina and holding it together throughout all those numbers."

Off stage, she squeezes in time with her husband, who works in advertising, and her year-old daughter, Frances (a child who's happily hypnotized by singing and shares the same name as Fanny's daughter). Both will be coming to Pittsburgh, along with the actress's parents and enough others to constitute a family reunion. She's never done anything that has generated this much interest.

"This has a greater kind of appeal, a broader appeal, which is the whole idea why I left ['Saturday Night Live'] to begin with. I was kind of ready to spread my wings a little bit. It's hilarious because, literally, I've never had more people [coming to see her] and they're traveling, which is just wildly impressive to me. People are coming from all over the country to see this thing. ...

"It's a really beloved musical, and it's just not done very often, so I think people want to come see it and hear music that they know and love."

Asked how she's been juggling work and motherhood, Gasteyer says, "I'm barely juggling it is the answer, but happily. It makes me a better mommy to work, and it makes me a better worker to be a mommy. It's one of those things that I just spend a lot of time with my daybook trying to figure it out, and I have an incredibly involved husband, which is great."

Unlike the media, Gasteyer never viewed "SNL" as a launching pad. "You get this question from the second that you get there. 'Isn't this a launching pad? What are you going to be doing next? Where is this going?' And the fact of the matter is, it was a fantastic job, I learned a lot about versatility," jumping from junior high music teacher Bobbi Moughan-Culp to Margaret Jo McCullogh, co-host of NPR's "Delicious Dish."

"I got to hone my skills as a versatile performer. I got to hone my comedic talents. I don't know where I'm going next, but I did learn that I want it to be sort of a wide and diverse set of opportunities ahead of me. ... You just have to pick what's interesting to you, and what's interesting to me right now -- and I can promise you, no other 'Saturday Night Live' veteran is interested in -- is performing in a musical and doing a good job at it, and balancing my life as a mother with my life as an actor."

The first "SNL' star to be pregnant on the show, she's the voice of Post Cereal, has a role in the 2004 Garry Marshall movie "Raising Helen" and earned good reviews for her work in David Lindsay-Abaire's play, "Kimberly Akimbo," at the Manhattan Theatre Club this year. It's about a girl afflicted with a disease that ages her at four-and-a-half times the usual rate. Gasteyer played her aunt, a former convict who has been living in the public library.

After leaving "SNL," Gasteyer assured executive producer Lorne Michaels she would be happy to reprise her Martha Stewart impression, although she also told other cast members the role was theirs for the taking. Cybill Shepherd was cast in the Martha TV movie, prompting the New York Daily News TV critic to recall how it was Gasteyer who "got close to the core of Stewart's frighteningly tightly wound persona."

She was gone from "SNL" by the time Hillary Clinton became a best-selling author and, it now appears, the subject of a TV movie. "That's when life starts becoming like a 'Saturday Night Live' sketch, and my brain just hurts."