Anything Goes’ Kelly Bishop on Co-Star Sutton Foster and Her First Broadway Musical Since A Chorus Line

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Considering she won a Tony Award for the part, it’s hard to believe that Kelly Bishop’s performance as the brassy, ballsy veteran dancer Sheila (based on Bishop’s own life) in the original production of A Chorus Line was the last time she appeared in a Broadway musical. But it's true: Bishop's subsequent Rialto credits include Proposals, The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Bus Stop and Six Degrees of Separation, and her most recent New York stage appearance was in the delightfully dark comedy Becky Shaw. Her resume also includes plenty of high-profile mothers, from Wonder Boys and Dirty Dancing on the big screen to seven seasons as Emily Gilmore on Gilmore Girls. Now, more than 35 years after A Chorus Line, she’s playing overbearing mom Evangeline Harcourt in the Tony-winning revival of Anything Goes. Below, Bishop lets us in on why she’s avoided Broadway musicals for so long—and why she’s so glad to be back!

It’s always a thrill to walk through a Broadway stage door. As I watched the Tony Awards this year, I sat thinking, “My goodness, it’s been a long time since I’ve been on Broadway,” so when I got a call asking if I was interested in joining the cast of Anything Goes, it seemed like karma. I distanced myself from musicals after A Chorus Line in 1975. In fact, that’s the last musical I did on Broadway. I really wanted to be a straight actress, and I thought I had to disassociate myself with musicals because I’m not a singer and I didn’t want to go into that world. It worked in California almost immediately, but in New York, because of the love for A Chorus Line, people still held on to that concept of me as a musical performer so I stayed away from it.

Being back on Broadway in Anything Goes feels a little bit like coming home. I love stage actors. There’s something special about all people who have to do a performance eight shows a week, and musical people, especially, are so much fun. Dancers are the free spirits of the performing arts, and singers are a wonderfully fun lot of people, and it’s so nice to be around that kind of enthusiasm and energy again. Anything Goes is light stuff—we’re not doing any heavy drama here—but audiences have such a wonderful time. There is nothing more joyful to me than hearing a live audience laugh. Especially when I planned it that way!

I’ve been lucky enough to play some funny, nasty ladies in my day, and if you can make them foolish, they’re even funnier. Evangeline Harcourt is one of the sillier roles I’ve ever played because she takes herself so seriously. Other characters keep tricking her and she keeps falling for it; she falls for every disguise and every tall tale. But she’s not a stupid woman. She’s a silly, funny woman who has absolute belief in herself, which I just love. She’s so happy that her daughter is marrying well. She’s trying to hold on to that upper echelon of society, and she’s terribly worried that she might end up poor. Her utter confidence in thinking she’s right about things, even when she’s been tricked by the other characters, is that she believes the most recent story she's been told whole-heartedly.

Anything Goes is a wonderful departure for me, in some ways. It’s a little bit farce, it’s a little bit vaudeville and it’s really a lovely, classic chestnut. I tend to look for material that’s a little offbeat, which is why I loved things like Becky Shaw and Gilmore Girls. There was an innate sweetness to that series, because of that mother-daughter relationship, but it was not your average family drama. Anything Goes isn’t twisted in the same way, but I am playing another overbearing mother! It seems I’m stuck with that. I am a bit bossy in real life. I’m a little maternal, but mostly I have a tendency to think that I’m right about everything—which is usually a mistake.

There’s something wonderful about doing a musical. When you hear an overture—especially one as beautiful as an overture by Cole Porter—there’s nothing else like it. I even have a little tap section in the finale, and I thought, “OK, here we go again.” The cast has welcomed me with open arms and are treating me like a queen. They’re really a happy cast, which makes sense when you have somebody like Sutton Foster in the lead. She blows my mind. She’s a terrific actress, a great singer, she can dance, she’s really funny and besides being sexy, she’s got a goofy side to her that she’s not afraid to put out there. The attitude of a show always comes from the top, and she makes it a happy place for all of us.