Karen Ziemba: Why We Are "Show People"

About the author:
Never mind Kevin Bacon: In a musical-theater version of the popular trivia game, it's hard to imagine anybody being more than six degrees away from Karen Ziemba. Not only is Ziemba part of the large cast of the new Broadway musical Curtains her fifth Kander & Ebb show, counting a workshop, the Tony-winning actress has worked with a vast array of theatrical notables in a career spanning more than two decades. From Encores! Bye Bye Birdie, Allegro to New York City Opera 110 in the Shade, The Most Happy Fella to Broadway Contact, Steel Pier, Never Gonna Dance, A Chorus Line, Crazy for You, Chicago and more, Ziemba has made her mark on the New York stage as a triple-threat performer. Here, she looks back at the colleagues who have inspired her—and explains why she feels so comfortable on the stage.

My new musical Curtains is a celebration of what it really means to theater people to be in this business. A Boston detective, played by David Hyde Pierce, has quarantined the company of a Broadway-bound show to solve a murder, but what he really yearns for is to be one of us—to join our theater family, to be part of our tradition. Our lives in the theater are all about those two things: tradition and family.

For me, the experience of working on Curtains is like how you feel when you come home after a long day, it's sleeting outside and the apartment smells like chicken pot pie—I'm enveloped by the people who have nurtured me. The theater is a place where we're all there for each other. The people you share the stage with are as responsible for your performance as you are for your own.

John Kander and the late Fred Ebb, who wrote the Curtains score, have always been my "uncles" in the business. The first show that got me a lot of attention was And the World Goes 'Round, a revue of their songs. That show started a lot of careers, including director Scott Ellis and musical director David Loud, both of whom are working on Curtains. It also launched Susan Stroman's career as a major choreographer. Stro's and my sensibilities were a great match—she dared me to push myself to places I never would have gone, and from there the two of us went forward to collaborate on Crazy for You, Steel Pier and Contact winning Tonys for both of us. John and Fred, with book writer David Tommy Thompson, would write Steel Pier for me, and shortly before Curtains, I appeared in a workshop of All About Us, John and Fred's musical take on Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth.

The point is, if you can last in this business, you continue to grow up with your theater family. Rob Ashford, our Curtains choreographer, danced with me in Crazy for You and in the New York City Opera's 110 in the Shade, just as I danced alongside Rob Marshall, Kathleen Marshall, Casey Nicholaw and Jerry Mitchell before they became award-winning choreographers.

Every night, when I'm being zipped into William Ivey Long's '50s dresses, I think about how the character I'm playing, Georgia Hendricks an homage to Betty Comden, is the kind of quintessential musical comedy heroine that used to be played in the movies by my idols Ginger Rogers, Shirley MacLaine, Betty Garrett and Judy Garland: smart, sexy, funny, sings and dances, can give it right back to a man if she needs to, or do a pratfall.

I admired those heroines. When I was growing up near Detroit listening to Broadway cast albums and seeing the out-of-town tryouts of Broadway-bound shows, I sang along with Broadway legends like Gwen Verdon, Mary Martin, Ethel Merman, Barbara Cook, Julie Andrews, Chita Rivera and Angela Lansbury. I wanted to perform so much that I used to force my brothers to put my dance tights on their heads to make pigtails, and then we'd act out stories. I'd be the Princess and they'd be my Prince and Ladies in Waiting, and if they protested, I'd beat the tar out of them. I learned not to be afraid to fall on my butt, because with brothers, you're always getting pushed around.

My grandmother, Winifred Heidt, was a leading mezzo-soprano with the New York City Opera. And in worlds colliding, John Kander remembers seeing her play Carmen as a young man in Kansas City. She told me how important it is to be kind and generous to the people you share the stage with and to remember that they're the ones who make you look good and give you your power. When I was in college, I danced with the Ohio Ballet, but I kept envisioning those great women who not only danced, but could sing, make you laugh and break your heart. That's who I wanted to become.

The beginning of my career in New York was a master class with Broadway greats. Jerry Orbach gave me my first Broadway stage kiss when I played opposite him in 42nd Street. In rehearsal for Jerome Robbins' Broadway, Mr. Robbins never called me by my actual name. He'd shout out nicknames: "Hey, Miss Bennington!" since I was the most white-bread of the Shark girls in West Side Story, or "Hey, Fruma!" while I sang like a banshee in the dream sequence from Fiddler on the Roof. While dancing his incomparable choreography, I remember thinking, "It doesn't get any better than this."

I enjoy the special events theater actors do on our nights off, because we get to spend time with theater legends—like the night I shared a dressing room with Gwen Verdon and we talked about her take on Chicago's Roxie Hart, a role she created and one I was playing on Broadway at the time. And Chita Rivera has been such an inspiration to me. There's no one more supportive than Chita, who in one package is a great star and perennial gypsy. I finally got to work with Ginger Rogers when she directed me in Babes in Arms—only now, I was doing the parts she used to play. Ginger taught me the power of stillness. Watching her demonstrate a scene, I saw her beautiful face speak volumes, without making a sound.

I'm reminded every day how fortunate I am to make a living in the theater, and also to be a link from the traditions of Broadway's golden age to the theater's future. In musical theater, you spend your life honing special skills. Singing, dancing and clowning won't get you a job in corporate America. Even in movies or television, except in rare cases, you only use a sliver of those skills.

Live theater is one of the last traditions that's handed down from person to person. A young cast member in Curtains told me that watching me play Roxie in Chicago made her think, "I want to do what she's doing!" Now we're sharing the stage every night at the Hirschfeld Theatre, and I'm watching her grow—a beautiful singer-dancer-actress, on her way.

It's ironic that although everyone today stays glued to cell phones and BlackBerries, you read that people are feeling more isolated than ever. I remember right after 9/11, when people in New York finally started going out again, they went to live performances. Even people who had never attended before gathered in theaters, at the opera, the ballet or the Philharmonic. I think that's because no matter which side of the footlights you're on, you form a community and take a journey together for a couple of hours. We all need that.

I'm never more comfortable than when I'm performing onstage. I feel totally at home. There are easier ways to make a living and flashier ways to get famous, but the joy of the theater is that I get to share that unique journey with my fellow actors and the audience every day.

Tradition is about knowing where you came from, and who you are. Some years ago, I was touring in Crazy for You, playing one of those smart, funny, sexy gals I grew up wanting to emulate. One night in L.A., Gene Kelly came to the show, and afterward, he came backstage to talk to the cast. We were all so thrilled. We were talking about his movies, and he was very self-effacing and said something like, "Oh, come on, you remember that old stuff?" And I just looked at him, and I said, "Are you kidding? That's why we're all here."