Upping the Auntie: A 'Mame' Makeover

As Mrs. Lovett in "Sweeney Todd," Baranski was a particular hit at the Kennedy Center's Sondheim Celebration in 2002, for which Schaeffer served as artistic director. That put KenCen President Michael Kaiser and producer Max Woodward in the mood for a bit of matchmaking. What, they thought, can we have her in next?

"Mame," she said confidently, having played the part in, well, high school.

For all Baranski's success, she still may not seem like the obvious choice to headline a musical comedy. Her pattern is to dip in and out of musicals; "Sweeney" was the biggest singing role she'd ever had, and she hasn't done a major musical since. "In between was a lot of life," the actress says in the course of discussing parenthood and losing her own mother at the end of the "Sweeney" summer.

Yet Baranski almost didn't take "Cybill" because of her interest in musicals. She was attached to Michael John LaChiusa's "Petrified Prince" and hoping that director Hal Prince might take it to Broadway. The choice was tougher than you'd think.

She says, "I remember sitting on Sunset Strip -- it sounds like something I'm making up -- in a little cafe reading the New Yorker. And in this issue was a review of the television show I was doing, with a rather stunningly good review for me, personally, this character." ("Has the killer technique," James Wolcott wrote. "Does more with a squinch of her eyes than Cybill does barrelling full speed ahead.") "And in the same issue," Baranski continues, "was a terrible review of 'The Petrified Prince.' " ("Jejune" was the kindest word in John Lahr's body slam.) "And I was sitting there going, 'Whoa -- close call.' "

Not the usual "theater is my true love" boilerplate from actors; this is the anecdote of a performer happy to surf from stage to screen to tube. "You can do the math," she says, sounding very Mame-y. "I graduated from Juilliard in 1974. That's a long career -- why would one want to be stuck doing just any one thing?"

Still, Baranski thinks she might be doing more theater now that her kids are safely out of the nest, and even floats the possibility of doing a bit o' the Bard here with her Juilliard teacher, Shakespeare Theatre Company artistic director Michael Kahn. And she sounds particularly grateful to be getting her musical breaks at the Kennedy Center, with full stagings and a robust orchestra -- the latter being a particular point of pride with Kaiser.

"It's difficult to produce 'Sweeney' in New York because it's cost-prohibitive, in the same way 'Mame' is," Baranski notes. Director John Doyle's current Broadway production of "Sweeney," in which 10 actors double as the onstage orchestra, is mentioned for contrast by several people associated with this production -- although Doyle just gave his signature treatment to Herman's "Mack and Mabel" in London, and Herman loves it.

In conversation, Baranski displays an appealingly light touch; almost everything about her seems classy and breezy, right down to the coppery high heels she props up on an executive chair. (At one point she deadpans, "All I do, really, in this show, is change clothes.") It has been written that Baranski is never seen without lipstick and pearls, and in this appearance she's true to form.

"I would hope," she says, serving a notion about the abiding thrust of the show with a convivial laugh, "that doing this musical in Washington would make being liberal very cool and sophisticated and fabulous, in the way that it was. It used to be very cool to be a liberal. And she's a very cool liberal, Mame."

That Bona Fide Star

Picture it: The current cast of "Mame," interrupted during rehearsal by Angela Lansbury herself. It happened a few weeks ago when she was in town for the Kennedy Center Gala; Schaeffer had his actors salute her with that final adulating chorus of the title tune.

Baranski smiles as she says: "She kind of did a little dance and strutted around a bit and wiped a tear away. It was so beautiful."