When Sherri Shepherd, the actress and talk-show host, was offered the role of Genie in the Broadway musical “Aladdin,” she wondered if the producers had the right person. “I look like a gospel singer, but I’m not a singer — I got voted off ‘The Masked Singer’ in the fourth week,” she said. (She sold herself short: She went out in the fifth.)
Shepherd was equally self-deprecating about her dance moves, noting that she was eliminated from “Dancing With the Stars” in Week 4.
Those doubts only spurred her on, though. “Anything that scares me, I say yes to,” Shepherd said.
After agreeing to a limited run, it dawned on her: She would be the first woman to play Genie on Broadway. “All the Genies have been big, tall Black men, and Robin Williams,” she said. “I thought, ‘Sherri, what did you do?’”
Shepherd, 59, was chatting before a 1 p.m. Wednesday matinee at the New Amsterdam Theater.
The hair and makeup supervisor, Cheryl Thomas, started working on Shepherd around noon, and the actress did vocal warm-ups, and then ran lines under her breath.
When she was properly bewigged and made up, Shepherd, still murmuring lines and lyrics, moved to her dressing room to get into Genie’s famous blue velvet costume, helped by the dresser Cathy Cline. This isn’t Shepherd’s first time on Broadway, but portraying the cruel stepmother in “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” in 2014, was less of a lift.
Genie, she said, “is completely different: She is frantic, frenetic. Every time you look at her, a channel is changing in her brain.”
Just before 1 p.m., Shepherd joined a backstage prayer circle with other team members, including Caleb A. Barnett, who had been playing Genie and is a standby during Shepherd’s run.
Soon Shepherd was in the wings, running lyrics from “Arabian Nights,” the opening number that introduces Agrabah, a city of flying carpets Genie describes as having “more glitz and glamour than any other fictional city in the world!”
After “Arabian Nights,” Shepherd retreated offstage. A spectacle like “Aladdin” has many moving parts and costume changes, so the wings feel like a Formula 1 pit: They are cramped, actors and staff members move in practiced choreography, and everything happens fast-fast-fast. While Rodney Ingram, who plays Aladdin, belted “Proud of Your Boy,” glitter was being applied to Shepherd’s face, suggesting the transformation from narrator to Genie. She remained preternaturally serene — her work on “The View” and her own daytime talk show have seemingly taught her a degree of calm in high-pressure situations.
And those can be literal at “Aladdin,” in which she must squeeze into a narrow hydraulic lift to be propelled from basement to stage — she looks like a human package in an old-fashioned mail tube.
Aladdin is the character who spends the most time with Genie, and the pair first meet in “Friend Like Me,” the epic number near the end of Act I. After Aladdin frees Genie from a lamp, she demonstrates her powers, teasing, “Can your friends do this?” in a whirlwind of song and jest. The script was tweaked to accommodate Shepherd so, for example, Genie reveals “my very own syndicated talk show” as a prize in a fantasy game. In between theatrical heavy breathing at the end of the song, Shepherd dramatically fans herself and riffs about being exhausted and overheating, joking about hot flashes and “Genie-pausing” (Genie speak for menopause).
As for the new dynamic a woman brings to the role, Ingram appreciates it. “It’s not the bromance of the Genie,” he said. “Now it’s something totally unique and different. Paired with the fact that Sherri is just lovely on and offstage, it’s really a wonderful connection.” (You can watch a sample on YouTube: Ingram and Shepherd performed this month on “Disney Night” of “Dancing With the Stars.”)
Genie disappears for relatively long stretches while Aladdin; his love interest, Jasmine (Sonya Balsara); and the baddie Jafar (Dennis Stowe) drive the show. But when she is on, she is on. And that requires a stamina that Shepherd has had to learn to manage. “The big one that I told her to do is run on the treadmill and try to speak at the same time — just speak, not even sing,” said Michael Callahan, a dance captain.
Some mistakes definitely won’t happen again. “I had a meal before I ran back onstage,” Shepherd said of an early performance (she started Oct. 16). “That was the slowest Genie you ever saw going across that stage. She could barely move. Thankfully the Broadway community is so nurturing and caring,” she added. “They took me to the side and were like, just eat a little bit of protein just to get your energy up, do this, do that.”
Even as she fine-tunes her regimen, Shepherd said she is having a ball in “Aladdin,” where she is slated to appear through Jan. 3. “I’ll probably be at the end of my run begging to stay longer,” she said, and then laughed, remembering her prayer-circle buddy. “I don’t think Caleb is going to be happy about that.”
The post Sherri Shepherd Is Granting Wishes as the First Female Genie in ‘Aladdin’ appeared first on New York Times.
