There is a trail of trash cans plastered with Marla Mindelle’s face along the 10-minute walk from the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, where her musical “Titaníque” has been playing since 2022, to the Orpheum in the East Village, where her latest, “The Big Gay Jamboree,” is in previews.
Her face on the poster advertises both shows, and she sees that advertising placement strategy as God (and the shows’ marketing teams) doing some light trolling: retribution for her style of satire. Mindelle, a writer and performer who struck gold with the Céline Dion jukebox parody, “Titaníque,” years after calling it quits on her small Broadway roles, slings the type of vulgar, musical-theater in-jokes only someone with a deep love of (and knowing frustration with) the industry can get away with.
It’s that same sense of humor that lifted “Titaníque” from a basement theater in Chelsea into a commercial Off Broadway hit, and is now at work in “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle’s first musical with an original score.
Unlike “Titaníque,” a purposely unpretentious spoof of the James Cameron blockbuster film, “Jamboree” is an elaborately staged show about wanting to leave the world of musicals and is being produced in part by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company.
Mindelle, 40, sees it as her performing swan song.
At a cafe across from the theater where the new production will open on Sept. 30, she detailed what she views as a life of being comically at odds with her chosen profession.
Hers was a story well-known among certain musical theater-leaning millennials, many of whom turned out in droves to make “Titaníque” a smash. She was disliked, Mindelle says, by the heads of her B.F.A. program in performance so much so that Mindelle was not cast in anything during her senior year. Perhaps it was because she never fully bought into their self-seriousness, or because of the bit of attitude she projected that she laughs about with friends today.
“Musical theater school is like a cult, and we had a healthy distance from it and always viewed it with a bit of a side eye,” said the novelist Jonathan Parks-Ramage, a college friend and her “Jamboree” co-writer.
Mindelle, a native of Yardley, Pa., whose father, Stephen Weiner, is a composer, wrote a scathing cabaret as retribution and uploaded it.
“Before you know it, I had amassed a very niche following and became one of the unfortunate pioneers of the musical theater movement on YouTube,” Mindelle said with a laugh. “That started everything and inspired me, as a writer: No one did it for me, I’m going to do it myself.”
“And, honestly, I was belting really high and everyone in musical theater, for the most part, is gay, so I think people loved it,” she added.
Another viral moment came when her friend Connor Gallagher (now the director of “Jamboree”) uploaded her manic performance of “Colors of the Wind” at a 2006 Broadway fund-raiser. An audio clip of it would later be called for in the script for “Circle Jerk,” a 2020 play about gay men’s obsessions.
After she graduated, Mindelle booked the 2007 national tour of “The Drowsy Chaperone” and joined the 2008 Broadway revival of “South Pacific,” followed by character roles in “Sister Act” and “Cinderella.” But after college, which she described as “musical theater war, or gay prison,” the eight-shows-a-week grind led her to pursue writing jobs in Los Angeles.
That was a dead end. She wound up performing at dinner theaters, where she reconnected with Constantine Rousouli, another Broadway actor trying Hollywood. Though they had run in similar circles in New York they had never liked each other, but ended up bonding over the direness of their situation, performing in no-budget stage parodies of movies like “Cruel Intentions.”
“We were getting paid $70 per show, with fish and red sauce for food,” Rousouli said in a phone interview. “We’d ask what kind of fish it was and they wouldn’t know, but we were like, ‘Awesome, give it to us, we’re broke.’”
Mindelle’s one hope in those days was a film script she and Parks-Ramage had written and optioned: “Jamboree,” about a woman who wakes up hung over and trapped in a classic movie musical.
“We started writing it around the time of the Trump election,” Parks-Ramage said. “The culture was backsliding, and we wanted to do something that took place in a Golden Age musical but sent it up. Our love language is trolling, so we decided to troll musical theater in this meta way that was also a love letter.”
The two sold it to LuckyChap in 2019, but the project fell apart during development.
Then, a drunken idea Rousouli shared with Mindelle and their director friend Tye Blue led them to create “Titaníque,” with Mindelle starring as Dion, Rousouli playing Jack and Blue directing. It sold out several extensions at Asylum NYC, transferred to the larger Daryl Roth and began attracting big names, among them Robbie, who saw it last summer.
“I was sitting in the audience of ‘Titaníque’ and loving it, and I suddenly realized, gosh, that’s Marla playing Céline Dion,” Robbie said via Zoom.
She emailed Mindelle, who had been tinkering with the “Jamboree” script, to ask if she was looking for a producer for anything she had in the works.
“She asked when I wanted to do it and I was like, ‘Honestly, tomorrow,’” Mindelle said. “I don’t have much time left in this business. I’ve been doing it for a long time. I want to get out of it sooner rather than later.”
Soon Mindelle and Parks-Ramage were adapting the script for the stage, tightening it into the story of a failed actress physically trapped inside an old-timey musical at an Off Broadway theater. In trying to escape, she is joined by the fictional town’s Black music director, who is fed up with only ever singing gospel numbers; a promiscuous young woman (think Ado Annie from “Oklahoma!”); and a closeted gay woodsman.
“It is the amalgamation of someone who loves musical theater so much, but has been trolled by musical theater her entire life, which I feel is my journey,” Mindelle said.
The writers enlisted the composer Philip Drennen, another college friend, to help write the belt-heavy score with Mindelle, whose own upfront queerness, Drennen added, led to their instant attraction.
“We wanted to retain the joy of Golden Age musicals, while subverting them through lyrics,” Drennen said. “We owe so much to this art form — our friendship and lots of paychecks — and being here is all for the sake of musical theater, but it sometimes feels like an abusive relationship.”
The production — which features a set by dots, the design collective that worked on another improbable, queer-centric work, “Oh, Mary!” — references everything from the “Real Housewives” franchise and polyamory to Judy Garland and Jennifer Lopez.
“What we saw in ‘Titaníque’ is that you can make something campy and irreverent and niche, with a million pop culture references, and not everyone has to get it, but people will get something,” Mindelle said, later pointing to “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” and “Oh, Mary!” as being part of a resurgence of riskier queer theater.
“Do I hope this makes it uptown one day? Absolutely,” she said. “But, if not, and I get to walk 10 minutes from seeing my face as Céline Dion to seeing my face here, and on trash cans all over New York, and I’m just the queen of trash for the rest of my life, so be it.”
For Robbie, the production’s current downtown digs, where “Stomp” once held its decades-long residency, allows it to retain some of the intimate charm of “Titaníque,” even with a larger budget.
“It’s in the East Village, in the home of ‘Stomp’ and ‘Little Shop of Horrors,’ so it’s giving our show that nostalgic lineage to the world of musicals that have come before,” she said. “I just love the location and that, when you walk in, you can get a White Claw and some funny merch.”
With Blue overseeing productions of “Titaníque” across Australia, Canada and England, Mindelle has devoted herself to “Jamboree,” leading an ensemble cast that includes Rousouli and Alex Moffat.
Though Mindelle maintained that she would like to transition to writing, exclusively, it is clear that she loves the art of performance. At a recent preview, her entrance ignited an extended ovation from a very game audience. When another character asked her what you can “do” with a gay crowd once you’ve got them, her reply (“Anything you want”), with a fourth-wall-breaking wink, nearly stopped the show.
“Starring in and co-writing my second musical will be the greatest thing I’ll ever do in my life,” she said. “I’m not sure I’ll be able to top myself. But who knows? Never say never.”
The post ‘Titaníque’ Was Her Big Hit. Is ‘Big Gay Jamboree’ Really Her Swan Song? appeared first on New York Times.