I'm back at the lovely Anchor Inn in Provincetown, sitting on my balcony. But this time, instead of facing Commercial Street, my room faces the back so I'm looking at the beautiful bay.
Audra McDonald and I arrived today after taking a JetBlue flight out of Newark and then hopping on Cape Air. I always feel I have to warn people before they take Cape Air because those planes are tiny, but Audra was completely comfortable. When she was a kid, her dad used to fly the whole family in a very similar plane. We got to Ptown around 11 AM and decided to rent bikes. Why? Because when you get on one of those small flights, they have to be very specific about what they're carrying, AKA, before we got on the flight, Audra and I both had to tell our weight! Out loud! We were so plummeted that we immediately had to do cardio, which was counteracted right afterwards at tech rehearsal because the Fudge Factory is directly next to the theatre.
I arrived at tech and offered Audra an enorous homemade chocolate peanut butter cup, or as she wrote on her Twitter account, I "forced her to eat it." Delish! The concert was amazing but Audra and I were obsessed with the amount of adult ADD on display (we both have it). First, a large part of the tech rehearsal was spent looking for Audra's iPhone (turns out, she had left it in her room), then that night the stage manager called "places" and we were late because I was still writing the list of songs we were doing. Afterwards, as we were leaving the concert, I couldn't find what I did with the big book of music, and then at dinner, Audra couldn't remember what she did with her driver's licence. Yay! It's fun to hang out with us!
Speaking of fun, Audra apparently had a lot of fun at Unbroken Circle. According to this video, she not only cried, but she also laughed off two major parts of her body. Take a look at this evidence: unbrokencircletheplay.com/celeb-testimonials. If you, too, want to lose your rack, come see the show this Wednesday or Sunday!
On "Seth Speaks" I also had my young friend Maddy Ruff. Maddy is the stepdaughter of Ray Marchica, who I've known since the 90's because he was the drummer on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show," and the daughter of Nina Hennesey. I've always been so impressed with Nina, because she was in a ballet company and also was in Les Misérables! It's so rare to find people who can dance and sing at that level. Maddy is in her early 20's and when she was a teenager, she was a piano student of my ex-boyfriend Aaron. For a few months, she was complaining about a pain in her leg which she assumed was a muscle strain. When she began to limp a little she went to a doctor and found out she had a rare childhood cancer. She got a lot of chemotherapy, but there was a good chance the cancer could come back and if it did, it would certainly be fatal. Therefore, she and her doctors decided to amputate her leg.
This week at Unbroken Circle we had two "Saturday Night Live" stars come! The Wednesday matinee had Tina Fey in the audience and the Wednesday evening had Ana Gasteyer! Tina was there with her husband Jeff Richmond, and they were telling me about three different songs they're writing with Nell Benjamin for their musical version of "Mean Girls." So exciting! Tina also told me about what she called the "worst job in New York." During the week's horrific heatwave, she had passed a man dressed in a very heavy-looking robot costume walking about Times Square. She was so horrified by what he had to do that she actually took a video which she then showed me. It's so hard and fun to watch because as you watch you know it has to be over 100 degrees in his costume but it's not even like what he's doing is worth it in terms of results. He's simply walking like a robot in a heat stroke-inducing outfit while everyone in Times Square completely ignores him. The video is hilarious/devastating.
Michael was so great in the show...really amazing timing. And there were so many funny lines. There's one I was obsessed with goes something like, "'The Mirror Has Two Faces' stars Barbra Streisand as a frumpy Columbia professor of something, no one knows what, and also stars Mimi Rogers as Barbra's beautiful and stunning sister, which is perfect casting. (pause) What?!" At one point during the show, Michael took off his shoes and I immediately thought I saw an amazing arch/point. I confronted him backstage and I was right! He said that while he was at Juilliard the dance majors used to have a breakdown that he had such amazing facility, yet didn't dance. Look at the photo! Buyer and Cellar just announced that the run is open-ended so get thee ASAP.
Speaking of Barbra, I did a new deconstruction featuring her! Also, Patti LuPone, Julia Murney and Bernadette Peters! Watch it here!
And this week a new Obsessed video came out starring my hilarious friend Paul Castree where he re-creates his audition for The Wedding Singer. Watch!
All right, time for another bike ride with Audra. Peace! (Seth Rudetsky is the afternoon Broadway host on SiriusXM. He has played piano for over 15 Broadway shows, was Grammy-nominated for his concert CD of Hair and Emmy-nominated for being a comedy writer on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show." He has written two novels, "Broadway Nights" and "My Awesome/Awful Popularity Plan," which are also available at Audible.com. He recently launched SethTV.com, where you can contact him and view all of his videos and his sassy new reality show.)