You probably know Ana Gasteyer best from her six-season stint on Saturday Night Live, where she kept audiences laughing as a meek and unwittingly double entendre-spewing NPR host, topless Martha Stewart, and other ridiculous characters.
And now, she’s back on Broadway—yes, back!—starring as the silence-obsessed boy-mom Queen Aggravain in a new revival of Once Upon a Mattress at the Hudson Theatre (playing through November 30). The musical—by Mary Rodgers, Marshall Barer, Dean Fuller, Jay Thompson, and, for this iteration, a revised book by Marvelous Mrs. Maisel creator Amy Sherman Palladino—is a pretty silly affair. As Gasteyer tells Playbill: “It’s made to give you a brain vacation for two hours and 15 minutes.” So it’s no surprise that producers looked to Gasteyer to add some starry comedic prowess to the cast list, which also includes comedy experts Sutton Foster as Princess Winifred, Michael Urie as Prince Dauntless, and Brooks Ashmanskas as the Wizard.
But, Gasteyer says that people (at least the ones with the audacity to not be devout Wicked fans) tend to see her TV and film career and not realize that the singing part is completely in her wheelhouse, too. “Even some of the Mattress ensemble members were like, ‘You sing? I had no idea!’” she says. But sing she does, and has for many years.
After starring in high school musicals, Gasteyer began college as a vocal major at Northwestern. Then, she met the comedy and theatre “weirdos” (a term she uses with the utmost love and admiration) and flipped over to that side. After graduating, she moved to Los Angeles and started studying comedy at the Groundlings, an improv group and SNL training ground. She’d always hoped that theatre would be in her future, but her return to NYC ended up being to star in the long-running sketch comedy series.
According to Gasteyer, the comedy and theatre worlds aren’t altogether different—“Wigs and glasses are wigs and glasses,” as she puts it. And anyone familiar with her SNL characters knows that lots of them sang, like Bobbi Mohan-Culp, a middle school music teacher (with “husband” Will Ferrell) that took chart-topping hits and turned them into solo piano, classically sung disasters.
But, the comedy sensation was plotting a Broadway future almost the whole time. Soon after joining the show in 1996, she met Playbill’s Seth Rudetsky, then writing for The Rosie O’Donnell Show, in the NBC gym. “He, of course, being Seth, was like, ‘Hey you sang a High C as Bobbi Mohan-Culp!’” she remembers. “Nobody in sketch world gave a crap about that.” Before she knew it, Rudetsky had her singing in benefit concerts of Hair and Funny Girl, and she even participated in early workshops of musicals like Hairspray and All Shook Up.
Oh, and there was one other little scrappy show Gasteyer was circling in its early days: Wicked. “I was in the final callback for the final workshop,” she reveals. “But it was my final season of SNL, I was pregnant, and it was right after 9/11. I was like, yeah this is not going to happen.” And Gasteyer wasn’t in the running to ham it up as Glinda. She was going after Elphaba.
Gasteyer would eventually play the role, first in a post-Broadway sit-down Chicago run and eventually on Broadway as a replacement. Even though it meant setting comedy aside for a moment, Gasteyer knew the power of having that role on her resume. “I knew if I could play Elphaba, I could earn a spot in the vocal top tier of Broadway,” she shares. “People would actually believe I could do it, and not just that I was a ridiculous woman who wears wigs.”
In the years since, music has continued to be a big part of Gasteyer’s multi-faceted career. She’s released two albums and often incorporates jazz singing into her performances. And she’s appeared in filmed musicals like Grease: Live, A Christmas Story Live!, and the 2005 movie musical Reefer Madness.
Mattress doesn’t have her flying or singing in the rafters, but Gasteyer says the gig is exactly what she wants to be doing right now. “This came around, and I didn’t have to prove anything. I can just have fun,” she says. “I’ve found a happy medium in my life act.” But even more than that, Gasteyer says, was the people she’d be spending time with over the revival’s 18-week limited run. “I said yes before I even read the script because I saw Sutton and Michael and Brooks and Daniel Breaker and Will Chase and Nikki Renée Daniels. I was like, done! I’m going to do that show. This is going to be fun.”
It didn’t hurt that the role allowed Gasteyer to be a villain—she says voicing a Disney villain, specifically, is high up on her dream board. And she’s pulling from some pretty iconic baddies of the past to inform her domineering Queen. “Pat Carroll as Ursula is probably at the top of my mind,” she says. “She’s vocally so much lower than I am, but the grandeur! Oh, and a dash of Miranda Priestly.”
That last one, immortalized on screen in The Devil Wears Prada by Meryl Streep, is currently on its way to the stage as a musical, with Vanessa Williams starring in a West End premiere that begins later this year. And would Gasteyer be down to have her go at that role once Williams moves on? “Absolutely!” she exclaims.
“There’s something really fulfilling about, in my fourth decade in entertainment, allowing myself to be commanding and bossy,” she says. “I also scream, ‘QUIET!’ a lot at my terrier in real life, so that part came very naturally to me.”
Inspired type casting, we say.
Ana Gasteyer
Ana Gasteyer
Ana Gasteyer
Ana Gasteyer
Ana Gasteyer
Ana Gasteyer
Ana Gasteyer
