Broadway veterans join local performers on Lexington stage for one night only
Sara Gettelfinger was starring in “The Cher Show” last spring, which got her thinking about “A Christmas Carol.”
Specifically, she was thinking about the ghost of Christmas future and how it was like the character she played in the first regional theater production of the Broadway hit, which features three people playing the pop icon at different stages of her life. Gettelfinger played Star, the older version of Cher, who offers guidance to her younger selves.
That begs the question, what would Gettelfinger’s ghost of Christmas future tell her younger self?
“It would be to find balance,” says Gettelfinger, who will be featured in the Lexington Theatre Company’s “Concert with the Stars,” Jan. 7 at the Lexington Opera House. “For so long, you chase the resume. ... When it is so much your passion, you assume that once you achieve career success, that happiness will follow. The most profound thing that I have learned is that if you put a priority ... if not more priority on taking care of your heart and mind and spirit just as a human being, no matter what your vocation is, the career will not only take care of itself, but you’re going to be able to enjoy it by keeping it in its proper place.”
“Concert with the Stars” will not transport Gettelfinger back in time to talk to her younger self. But it will pair the Louisville native with young performers who aspire to a similar career, which has included Broadway shows such as “Seussical” and “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels,” where she originated the role of Jolene Oakes, tours of “The Addams Family” as Morticia, and “101 Dalmatians” as Cruella De Vil, and TV work such as “Sex and the City.”
Joining Gettelfinger in “Concert with the Stars” will be two other veteran performers:
J. Daughtry, who starred as Billy Flynn in the Theatre Company’s production of Chicago last summer. In addition to Broadway and touring credits such as “Ain’t Too Proud ...,” “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” and “Motown the Musical,” he has worked in R&B and gospel music backing up singers such as Patti LaBelle and Kirk Franklin.
Manna Nichols, who appeared on Broadway in “Allegiance” and in the national tour of Lincoln Center’s “The King & I,” and has an extensive regional theater resume including turns as Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady,” Marian Paroo in “The Music Man,” Kim in “Miss Saigon,” and Eponine in “Les Miserables.”
They will be collaborating with an ensemble of college and community performers on numbers that reflect their career highlights and favorites. While Gettelfinger is happy to impart some knowledge to her collaborators, she also acknowledges they are in a different world from the one she entered after graduating from the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music in the late 1990s.
“The biggest thing is that it’s like it’s not enough to be an artist anymore,” Gettelfinger says. “Even more with social media, and it’s this different planet of what their pressures are.”
Aspiring performers today, she says, feel the pressures of perfection and competition amplified by the constant presence of social media and other online outlets that make concentrating on craft difficult.
Gettelfinger says she now starts masterclasses saying, “You’ve got to ask yourself, do you want to be an artist, or do you want to be famous? I’m not saying you can’t do both. People absolutely do both all the time. But I can only help you with one of those in the next three hours.
“It’s just totally honest, because it is a different animal to the point where these young performers almost don’t know what to do with someone not only getting on the ground with them and really wanting to share an experience with them, but being their cheerleader.”
Lexington Theatre Company artistic director Lyndy Franklin Smith, who has a distinguished Broadway resume of her own, says, “it just feels so wonderful to have somebody who believes, like Sarah does, so passionately about passing on the craft, and about creating that supportive environment and about lifting up the next generation. I mean, that’s just exactly the kind of mentor that we want to bring in. And then on top of that, she’s from Kentucky.”
Though they both hail from the Bluegrass State and entered the professional theater world around the same time, “Concert with the Stars” is Franklin and Gettelfinger’s first time working together. They both were in the national tour of “Fosse” at the turn of the 21st century, but at different times, one of several shared experiences and near misses they discovered when they started talking.
“Concert with the Stars” finds Gettelfinger contemplating the second act of her career. She now resides in Indiana, just over the Ohio River from Louisville, and spoke from the Weber School of Dance in Jeffersonville, where she learned to dance and now sometimes holds classes with private students. “The Cher Show” and a 20th anniversary performance of “Seussical” were her first productions in several years, and now she is contemplating what she would like to do next.
She will open her “Concert with the Stars” set with a perfect song for a reflective time of life: John Kander and Fred Ebb’s “But the World Goes ’Round,” an anthem about life’s ups and downs made famous by Liza Minnelli in the 1977 movie “New York, New York.”
“I love that song,” Gettelfinger says. “I think it’s a beautiful, powerful, hopeful anthem in the ‘sometimes it’s up, sometimes it’s down’ way. I just I love that song.
“At this point in my life that I feel every bit of that song.”
Concert with the Stars
What: The Lexington Theatre Company’s annual production featuring Broadway veterans with college and community performers.
When: 8 p.m. Jan. 7
Where: Lexington Opera House, 401 W. Short St.
Tickets: $31-$66, available by calling 859-233-3535 or visiting lexingtonoperahouse.com.
