Marla Mindelle loves musical theatre—but she’s also been traumatized by it. “We do the craziest, stupidest things—just for the sake of being able to do theatre, because we love it that much,” she says. One of the craziest performances she ever did was in a nursing home. “I sang in a nursing home once, and I was optioning up to an E for the end of my song. I’ll never forget, as I’m singing this insane high note, a 90 year-old woman just lets out a loud, painful moan. I was like, ‘This is theatre.’”
Or there’s the dinner theatre production of Cats Mindelle did at 20, “where I was high pretty much 24 hours a day and got in trouble with stage management because I would hit people across the face with my tail.” Jellicles can—and Jellicles do.
Mindelle, perhaps best known for co-writing and starring as Celine Dion in Off-Broadway hit Titanìque, has channeled these traumas into her current musical theatre vehicle, The Big Gay Jamboree, which opened at Off-Broadway's Orpheum Theatre October 6. The irreverent musical centers on a jaded former musical theatre major who, after a night of heavy drinking, wakes up to find herself trapped in a Golden Age musical, complete with mid-Atlantic accents, weirdly sexist plot points, musical numbers, and a diegetic rotating stage (which really does not mesh well with the metabolized alcohol seeping out of her pores).
As in Titanìque, Mindelle both co-wrote (this time with Jonathan Parks-Ramage and Philip Drennan) and is starring in The Big Gay Jamboree. She says both shows play well with what is turning out to be her most dedicated and receptive audience: pop-culture, musical-loving millennials who are also more than a little bit jaded by both.
“Doing a show eight times a week is really, really hard—and then you’re still auditioning for your next job,” Mindelle says wearily.
But it’s not all bitterness. Mindelle says that love part is very real, and it’s why she keeps coming back to musical theatre. “It’s not curing cancer. It’s not brain surgery. It’s musical theatre,” she says. “It’s silly. It’s silly watching people sing and dance—and yet at the same time, there is nothing more transcendent than when you really get struck by the beauty of it. There is nothing more powerful to me than when I’m in the audience and someone is singing their face off at me or dancing. It’s like I’m transported to being a child again.”
Mindelle started her career in New York theatre—she performed on Broadway in the 2008 revival of South Pacific, originated the “Life I Never Led”-belting Sister Mary Robert in Sister Act, and created the role of stepsister Gabrielle in the 2013 version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella. But then, after a decade pounding the pavement, Mindelle defected to Los Angeles with aspirations of becoming a film and TV writer. Big Gay Jamboree was originally intended to be a movie—it was picked up by Barbie film star Margot Robbie’s production house LuckyChap and actually sold to Paramount. Mindelle says that a long and arduous development process eventually left her and the project at a dead end.
And then, perhaps predictably, theatre started singing its siren song once again. If Hollywood didn’t turn out to be as fruitful as she hoped, what Mindelle did get off the ground was Titanìque, a Céline Dion jukebox musical parody of 1997 disaster movie Titanic. Mindelle premiered the musical in Los Angeles with a one-night-only concert in 2017, bringing it to New York in 2018. That brief run was such a hit that it came back for an encore, and then (after just a little pandemic pause) a full Off-Broadway production in 2022 that’s still running at the Daryl Roth Theatre. And the show has already announced upcoming productions in London, Chicago, and Australia, too.
As it happened, Robbie caught a performance of Titanìque, and a few months later was ready to work with Mindelle again. The audience for Titanìque, Mindelle says, has turned out to be “a lot of homosexuals, and a lot of bachelorette parties"—both groups that famously tend to be Broadway fans, too. So, when Robbie called her up, resurrecting that failed movie and turning it into a stage musical seemed like the ticket.
But Mindelle says that the musical currently performing at the Orpheum is a far cry from the movie that was once to be. “When we re-wrote it, we realized that putting it on stage gave us so many more opportunities than a movie,” she says. “You can really go balls to the wall. You can go on tangents.” And tangents it goes on. The Big Gay Jamboree lampoons Golden Age musicals—primarily the oddly rapey Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—but it also has songs about Mindelle’s love of the Real Housewives franchise, the modern gay lexicon (imagine a yassified “Do Re Mi”), and more. “There’s maybe like one song that’s similar [to the abandoned movie version], but it’s completely different,” Mindelle says. “It’s a lot more irreverent. It’s wackier. And it’s starring me, which would never have been the case in Hollywood.”
By the way, as a Playbill reader you’ve probably picked up on the more than passing resemblance between the plots of The Big Gay Jamboree and Schmigadoon!—the Apple TV+ series that landed a modern couple in a mystical, musical theatre-filled town populated with riffs on characters from Brigadoon, The Music Man, and other Golden Age musicals. Mindelle says that coincidence is one of timing; Jamboree was in the works as a movie before Schmigadoon! happened.
“People can have the same kind of ideas, and they can both be brilliant,” she says. “I mean, there are two Wild Partys, two Great Gatsbys. Things can happen and they can be similar and different, and people can prefer one or the other. That’s art.” (Notably, Schmigadoon! is getting the stage treatment too, with a production at Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center next year.)
But mostly, Mindelle says the last few years has taught her that no matter where she’s making art, theatre will probably always be her home. “There’s no greater artform than writing a musical,” she says. “There’s nothing harder, and yet nothing more fulfilling. I’d love to continue writing musicals, and become Marla Lloyd Webber and DJ at my own musical with Countess Luanne by my side. That’s the dream.”
And as for musicals Mindelle might actually want to be trapped in…well, that’s complicated. She says she’s been a particular fan of The Secret Garden since she was a kid, and while that’s the answer that first comes to mind, she recognizes that that also might leave her dead on arrival from cholera. And so she has a different final answer, one that is perhaps somewhat unexpected: Mamma Mia!
“I know in theory that sounds terrible,” she explains, “but being on a Greek beach with ABBA blasting actually doesn’t sound that bad to me. Hot guys, Meryl Streep, the ghost of Meryl Streep—that sounds pretty fucking good.”
The Big Gay Jamboree
Brad Greer, Jeremiah Ginn, Olivia Puckett, Jillian Mueller, and Marla Mindelle in The Big Gay Jamboree
Amanda Lee, Jillian Mueller, Marla Mindelle, Olivia Puckett, and Natalie Walker in The Big Gay Jamboree
Marla Mindelle, Paris Nix, and company of The Big Gay Jamboree
Natalie Walker and company of The Big Gay Jamboree
Constantine Rousouli in The Big Gay Jamboree
Alex Moffat and Marla Mindelle in The Big Gay Jamboree
