Susan Egan: Belle, Meg, Glamour and Goop - Part 3

This is the conclusion of my three-part interview with Susan Egan, the original Belle in Broadway's Beauty and the Beast and the voice of Meg in Disney's Hercules. For part one, click here. For part two, click here.

Nina Doesn't Care

Susan Egan's reality check, courtesy of her five-year old daughter, Nina:

Nina: Mom, when you pretended to be Belle, you had a yellow dress?
Susan: Yes, I had a yellow dress.
Nina: You had long hair?
Susan: Mmm hmm, yeah I did.
Nina: Okay.
[pause]
Nina: Ariel is my favorite princess.

Susan Egan's 2011 CD
The Secret of Happiness

There's nothing like the sweet, innocent, brutal honesty of a child. "I played so many princesses," said Susan, "and so many little girls liked to meet me at the stage door, that I foolishly thought someday when I'm a mom and have little girls, they're going to think I'm pretty cool. How naive."

Susan's friends, of course, gleefully fueled the fire when it was time for Nina's birthday. "Do you know how many Ariel Barbies she got? And Ariel swimming light-up Barbies for the bathtub?"

By Susan's account, Nina's favorite princesses are, in order, Ariel, Rapunzel, Tiana and Pocahontas. "It's ok if she doesn't like Belle," Susan added. "It's kind of brilliant. And, by the way, I have another daughter now who also is obsessed with Ariel. You know, it's just God's little joke."

Susan may not have been Nina's favorite princess, but she's still Nina's favorite mommy, a role Susan relishes playing. Never did she appreciate it more than a few years ago. "I was up for a really huge TV show as a mom when Nina was probably 18 months old. It was callback, callback, callback. It was one of those things when you're like, 'This is it. This is the one.' Everything about it made sense. I did really well. And then, the final audition, it was between me and one other actress, and in the room with all the executives--it's the 900th time (I've) done the scene--it just doesn't land. I just went 'THUNK.'"

Susan lost the part and shared her disappointment with her husband, Robert, via text. After a few exchanges, Robert chimed in with, "It's okay. You still get to be Nina's mommy."

Susan's spirits lifted. "I rebounded in the second I read it. And I just thought, 'What a blessing,' you know? Nothing is as important as it used to be, because the only thing that's important now is her.

"I would so rather go home right now and deal with whatever dramas she's creating than get hung up on not getting this job."

Parenthood puts everything in perspective.

It's this appreciation of what's truly important that inspired "Nina Doesn't Care," a song Susan co-wrote with musician Brian Haner for her 2011 CD The Secret of Happiness. As Susan explained, "Nina doesn't care if I get a great review. But, Nina doesn't care if I get a crappy review. And so, thank God."

By the way, the woodland creatures that populate the "Nina Doesn't Care" video were animated by Ken Duncan, the same person who was supervising animator for Susan's Meg in Hercules.

Glamour and Goop

The Secret of Happiness is Susan's sixth solo CD in a busy entertainment career that's included live vocal performances with the National Symphony Orchestra, Hong Kong Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. Over the years, she's appeared on stage at Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center and the Hollywood Bowl. She's also taught master classes at USC, Pepperdine and other universities across the country. This fall, Susan will travel to Spain to perform in concert and to give a master class in Madrid.

While Susan's work has spanned from the recording studio to Broadway, from television to film, she's always had a special fondness for the stage. "I like the live performances," she said, "because I like meeting the audience. I like being in the same room as they're in." Her repertoire includes a number of cabaret shows she's done with her longtime friend and collaborator, composer Georgia Stitt. "I'm like her alter-ego and she's my alter-ego. We're in the same place in our lives."

Susan and Georgia share a special bond by both having two daughters around the same age. In fact, their second girls were born three weeks apart. Ever the consummate performers, Susan and Georgia saw their mutual pregnancies as an opportunity to create a new show. Said Susan, "The last time we were pregnant, I told Georgia about a concert I did the first time I was pregnant. I did a concert in New York called 'Susan Egan: All Knocked Up' and it was really funny. I had what I called a 'pregnancy medley.' It's songs you know and love, but they just somehow sound different coming from a really pregnant woman. Like 'I've Got You Under My Skin' or 'I Get a Kick Out of You'--this whole medley of just stupid Cole Porter and Gershwin and stuff."

With that in mind, Susan talked her friend into doing "Susan and Georgia: All Knocked Up," which went on to become a hit in both L.A. and New York. It wasn't long before Georgia suggested that with a few tweaks, their show would work well with them performing just as moms. Susan agreed. So, ever since, as circumstances and their schedules allow, Susan and Georgia take the stage together as working moms. Susan said, "We did a Disney social media moms concert last year that was just like a rock concert. It was crazy."

Another time, Susan was scheduled to perform on a Disney cruise and her regular accompanist, Chris McGovern, was unavailable. As a favor to Susan (and undoubtedly because it was a Disney cruise), Georgia agreed to fill in for McGovern. Both of their husbands would be out of the country, so Susan and Georgia packed up their gear and their girls and trundled through LAX to catch a flight to Orlando. "The two of us had six-month olds in Bjorns," said Susan. "And she had a four-year old. I had a three-year old. Several people just looked at us and they're like, 'Wow, good luck with that!'

"So, we had a great time on the cruise, but about 40 minutes before our concert was supposed to go up, we are in our cabin. We've got four girls under the age of five in a bathtub. They're splashing us. We're in our gowns, in our makeup. They're all soapy-sudsy. And we're trying to get them out and dressed so that the babysitter can watch them while we go and do a show. And it was just in the middle of being splashed that Georgia turns to me. She's like, 'How's it feel to be a big Broadway star?' And I just started laughing.

"On our flight home, when the girls are sleeping, I turn to Georgia. I go, 'It's glamour and goop. That's what we do. We're just like any other working moms.' The range is a little bit more juxtaposed because sometimes we put on sparkly dresses and we stand in the spotlight. But really, we're just a bunch of working moms trying to multitask."

Susan Egan: A working mom in a sparkly dress

Glamour and goop. They define the singer-actress who dazzled audiences as Belle and charmed movie-goers as Meg. They're the highs and the lows, the successes and the disappointments of a working mom in a show business life. And they'll always present themselves in different forms when they're least expected. Said Susan, "Sometimes the glamour is coming home to Nina, and not getting the job is the goop. And sometimes the glamour is, you know, being awarded a big award and the goop is your daughter throwing up on your beaded dress right before you have to go. So, it always changes. It makes life so fun."

You can keep up with Susan on her website, her Facebook page and on Twitter. You can also follow her with her partner in crime, Georgia Stitt, on their blog, appropriately named Glamour & Goop.

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Susan Egan: Belle, Meg, Glamour and Goop - Part 2

This is part two of my conversation with Susan Egan, the original Belle in Broadway's Beauty and the Beast and the voice of Meg in Disney's Hercules. Hate walking into the middle of a conversation? Click here for part one.

A Real Slice

Susan Egan records the voice of Meg in Hercules.

While Susan was still in New York with Beauty and the Beast, Disney was looking for an actress with Broadway chops to voice Megara in Hercules. At first, Susan was very interested, but Disney was not. "They wouldn't let me audition for it. Because, I was Belle. And they're like, 'You're not right for Meg at all.'"

Susan persisted. "I just kept begging and begging and begging. Literally, to shut me up, they let me go in and audition."

At the audition, she was relieved to see familiar faces from Beauty and the Beast, including composer Alan Menken and musical director Michael Kosarin. But, despite the friendly atmosphere, Susan still found the experience disconcerting. "You're standing in front of a microphone and they say, 'We're going to tape your audition.' And then, they all put their heads down." Their heads were down because they were looking at drawings of Meg to see if they worked with the voice they were hearing. It made sense, but it wasn't the type of audition Susan was used to or was even expecting.

Susan drew her inspiration for Meg from 1930s and 40s Hollywood actresses. "I've seen every Bette Davis (film), every Joan Crawford, every Barbara Stanwyck, every Lauren Bacall. I've seen them all. There's a cadence to those 30s movies. It's that mid-Atlantic accent, but it's got this sing-songy cadence.

"I don't know why it made sense to me, but probably because I was single and living in New York. The peak of my day was at 10:30 at night, so I was up until three or four in the morning. And then I'd sleep 'til 11 and all that was on TV were all these old movies [laughs]. And I watched them every night."

So, Susan channeled her favorite femme fatales and the audition went very well. "All these heads that were looking down at the table, one by one they popped up. And they went, 'Ohhh.'"

And then the waiting began. "There's no callback," said Susan, "because the callback is the tape--this is how long ago it was--it was actually a cassette tape that then goes through all the callbacks and it took about nine months."

Every now and then, Susan would hear from Kosarin that she was still in the running for Meg. Finally, when she was in Los Angeles, she made the breakthrough. "I am now at the Shubert Theater doing Beauty and the Beast and Eisner is walking down the hallway and he's like, 'Hey, great audition for Hercules!" And I'm like, 'I've made it as far as Eisner! Good, okay.'"

By then, test animation had been done with Susan's voice. It was a good fit. Later that week, she got the job.

When recording at the studio started, Susan learned quickly that directors John Musker and Ron Clements were after more than just her voice. To assist the animators with her character, all her body movements and facial expressions were filmed. "I don't look anything like Meg, " said Susan, "but when the movie came out eighteen months later, my friend Laura said, 'It's the first time I ever recognized you in a performance.' She's like, 'Belle, you're acting. I forget it's you. Meg is so you.'"

Susan recalled early in production going over the storyboard for Hercules. One particular drawing showed Meg saying, "Thanks for everything, Herc. It's been a real slice" while she sliced the air with her hand. Looking at the drawing, Susan commented to producer Alice Dewey, "That is so weird. I did that at my audition." Dewey replied, "Where do you think we got it from?"

That "real slice" line would turn out to be problematic. Musker and Clements really loved how Susan delivered the line at her audition; so much so, that they went to great lengths to get her to recreate it in the recording studio. "They couldn't use (the audition tape) because there was ambient noise," said Susan. "I mean, it was an audition space in New York City. You could hear the traffic."

Over and over again, Susan repeated the line. "Thanks for everything, Herc. It's been a real slice." She would get close to what the directors wanted, but the audition always sounded better. She said, "They paid me for an entire session fee for me to go in and say the line exactly as I had. And they were never satisfied."

The solution after all that work: digitally clean up the audio on the original recording. The line you hear in the movie is Susan's audition.

Hercules is a fun, freewheeling film based as loosely as you could imagine on Greek mythology. The son of Zeus, Hercules, must prove himself to be a true hero in order to take his place among the gods on Mount Olympus. On this quest, he battles all manner of evil beasties, matches wits with the god of the underworld, Hades, and falls for the saucy Meg, who may or may not be in cahoots with Hades and who may or may not be the girl of Hercules' dreams.

The film is full of smartly anachonistic pop culture references with an inspired song score by composer Menken and lyricist David Zippel. The movie may be set in ancient Greece, but the soundtrack is right out of Motown. Meg's signature song, "I Won't Say I'm in Love," is a '60s-style doo-wop number with solid backup vocals by the Muses, "goddesses of the arts and proclaimers of heroes" who serve as the ad hoc narrators of the film. Susan knew the ladies who voiced the Muses from Broadway, so in the recording studio, she was equal parts appreciation and intimidation about their talents, especially when it came to running off some gospel-tinged musical riffs. "I've never felt so white and square in a room as the day we recorded that song," explained Susan with a laugh. "Alan would say, 'Okay Lillias (White), just do a riff over there and LaChanze, you do a little something over here and Susan, just at the end, get from this note to this note and just do a riff.' I raise my hand and I'm like, 'Umm, can you plunk it out on the piano?' He looks at me like, 'Are you kidding?'"

A half hour later, Susan got it down. Meanwhile, her Muses were peeling off one amazing riff after another. "They gave him twenty brilliant takes all different. It was terrible. It was so humbling."

Working with her fellow voice actors was a bit less intimidating. Of course, Susan didn't spend a whole lot of time with them. Recording lines for an animated feature can be lonely work. Actors will lay down most of their voice tracks without other actors present so the directors and animators can more easily work with the material. On-screen conversations are often assembled from the best takes from the individual recording sessions. On the rare times actors do record together, the process can be pretty methodical. As Susan explained, "When you're doing the scripted scenes, you can't actually do it like you normally would, because they don't want any overlap. Because they want to be able to edit everything out. And then, once they get it that way, the way they like it, then the reason you're actually there is to then overlap like normal conversation.

"I had a handful of sessions with Tate (Donovan, the adult Hercules) and a handful of sessions with James Woods (Hades). I actually never had a session with Danny DeVito (Herc's excitable trainer, Phil). I've still never met him."

Susan tries to get a word in edgewise with James Woods.

Once the scripted lines were done, Susan was given some leeway to improvise with her fellow actors. "With James Woods, that was hard," she recalled with a laugh, "because he never stopped talking." She had an easier time with Tate Donovan, not that everything she did made it into the final film. "(Hercules and Meg) had just seen Oedipus and Tate says, 'Boy, I thought I had problems.' I go, 'Yeah, there's a boy who loves his mother.' You know, kids would not have gotten it, but the parents would have. And, I think it would've been hilarious. It was so sad they wouldn't put it in there."

Hercules premiered on June 15, 1997 and went into wide release on June 27. Critics were mostly enthusiastic. Owen Gleiberman with Entertainment Weekly gave Hercules an A-minus rating, calling it "delightful...a Disney fable savvy enough not to let its sincerity get in the way of its zippy multimedia charm." He called Susan's Meg "a refreshingly saucy maiden with big hair and a voice of suave huskiness."

Refreshing, and definitely a departure from Disney's pantheon of damsels in distress, Meg is a complex and conflicted character that defies classification. "She's her own category," said Susan. "She's the only Disney heroine that starts off as Cruella de Vil and then becomes Belle. She's the only one that makes a change. She starts off on the evil side and then becomes the good side. So, where do you classify her? She's not a villain and she's not the heroine. And she's not a princess and she doesn't even get to be a goddess.

"I love her. I wouldn't trade her for the world."

Coming Friday: The conclusion of our story. Susan's played a princess and has been immortalized in Disney animation. Her daughter doesn't care.

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Susan Egan: Belle, Meg, Glamour and Goop - Part 1

Susan Egan

For Beauty and the Beast's original Belle on Broadway, it all comes down to glamour and goop, the sparkle of performing in the spotlight coupled with the demands of being a working mom.

It was only fitting, then, that the first thing Susan Egan said to me when we talked on the phone was, "I'm doing a little lesson with my daughter at the same time. I hope that's okay."

It was a music lesson, of course, with five-year old Nina circling notes on a page. A few minutes later, satisfied with Nina's progress, Susan sent her off to play. All without missing a beat of our interview.

Multi-tasking. It's a requirement in the world of glamour and goop.

The Belle of Broadway

Susan holds a unique place in Disney history with having not only played the female lead in Disney's first-ever Broadway musical, but also lending her voice to a main character in a Disney animated feature film. Susan was the voice of Megara, Hercules' sassy girlfriend in 1997's Hercules.

It almost never happened. At first, Susan had no interest in auditioning for Beauty and the Beast. There were other Broadway productions--revivals such as My Fair Lady, Carousel and Grease--that she was far more interested in. "I thought it was a terrible idea for Disney to put a cartoon on Broadway," she said. "I was such a snob. But, my agent said, 'Go to the audition. You've never met the casting director and, by the way, I think you're wrong. I think it's a great idea.'"

Biases toward Disney invading Broadway aside, Susan didn't think she had the right look to play Belle anyway. "The character is described as 'the most beautiful girl in the village. And I am decidedly not that. I am 'average girl next door.'"

She turned out to be far from average.

Having yet to see the 1991 animated film, she had nothing to inform her audition other than her own creative instincts. While most other actresses were imitating Paige O'Hara (the original voice from the film) to play Belle, Susan took a different approach. After reading over the her script--a scene between Belle and her father--she thought, "(Belle's) odd, she's quirky, she's funny. I went in and I was funny. I made them laugh. It didn't occur to me as anything special, but I think in this instance, surprisingly, not having seen the movie helped.

"I was the last girl to audition on the last day they were holding their initial audition, and they'd seen--I don't know how many--500 girls do the same reading. And I just think maybe it was just like, 'Oh my, gosh, it's something different.' They didn't know it could be done in a different way."

Susan as Belle in Broadway's
Beauty and the Beast

Susan's quirky interpretation of Belle kept her on the callback list. For a week, she continued auditioning for the show's director and musical director, even singing for composer Alan Menken. All the while her competition was gradually being eliminated. "The last week was really grueling," she said. "You want to wear the same thing every day 'cuz now you're superstitious about it. Like, okay, it's the dress they like. And so, by the end of that week, literally, the dress could've sung the song. But, you don't want to take it to the dry cleaner because, God forbid, they ruin it or they lose it. And you're like, 'GAAAA, I'll never get this job.'"

On the last day of auditions at the John Houseman Theater, Susan remained with about ten other actresses. "I did my quirky reading," she said. "I made the Disney executives laugh. They kept me. I read with two different Beasts. I read with three different Gastons. And, at the very end of the day--I was there from nine to five--the director came up and he says, 'You know, I don't know what I would have you do if we ultimately cast you in this, but could you just...'

"I go, 'Play it like a straight ingenue?'

"He's like, 'Yeah, do you mind?'"

She dialed down the quirkiness. She nailed it.

"They called me that night and I'd gotten the job."

Susan was overwhelmed. "I'm wandering around my studio apartment (in Harlem) going, 'I don't know what to do with myself.' So, I went down the street to Blockbuster and picked up a pint of Ben & Jerry's Coffee Heath Bar Crunch and rented (Beauty and the Beast). And I popped it in my VCR and watched it. That's how I celebrated. And then I went, 'Holy crap! Oh my God! That's a big role!'"

At the young age of 22, Susan had been cast as the female lead in her first Broadway show, a massive musical production based on a critically acclaimed, award-winning film. Oddly enough, she didn't feel any added pressure. "Ignorance is such a really good thing and it served me well," she said. "No, I didn't (feel pressure). There was the pressure of being the lead in the show, but I didn't know what I didn't know."

Susan benefitted from being cast alongside a host of veteran Broadway performers like Terrence Mann (Beast), Gary Beach (Lumiere) and Beth Fowler (Mrs. Potts). "They literally had me under their wings," she said. "They had all been in big hits and big flops and so they probably knew more than I did."

As a company, though, Disney was still very new to the New York stage and had a number of bumps to smooth over along the way. Said Susan, "They thought we had to look exactly like the movie and sound exactly like the movie...I was was in flats, Terry was in lifts so that our silhouette would be the exact dimensions of that famous movie poster."

Early on, Beauty and the Beast relied heavily on elaborate costumes and prosthetics to make the production look as much like the movie as possible. This was ironic considering Disney's legacy as a purveyor of imagination and fantasy. The show didn't trust the audience's ability to suspend disbelief, something theater-goers are routinely asked to do. Susan said that attitude began to change as they prepared for out-of-town previews in Houston. "Our best performance of Beauty and the Beast ever was our final run-through in the rehearsal room with no costumes. And there was so much heart and so much emotion in it."

And so, throughout the show's 1993 year-end preview, the artifice was gradually peeled away. "They took all the prosthetics away," said Susan. "They just used makeup for the Beast and the inanimate objects. And we got a lot of the heart back. I mean, you don't want to cover up Terry Mann's face. You don't want to do it."

Susan Egan, Terrence Mann  and the
cast of Beauty and the Beast,
The Disney Magazine, Spring 1994

Beauty and the Beast was enthusiastically received in Houston, so much so that its run was extended for an extra two weeks. In an early review, Jerome Weeks with Variety wrote that the show "could well be the big new musical hit this Broadway season has been waiting for."

Good out-of-town notices, however, do not always equate to critical success on Broadway. "We were hated in New York," said Susan. "There were like five Broadway producers and they all wanted Disney money. And they had been trying to get (CEO) Michael Eisner and Disney to produce theater. And, of course, Eisner was like, 'Why do I need you? I'll just do it myself.'"

That type of arrogance did not play well with the Broadway establishment.

Beauty and the Beast opened at the Palace Theater on April 18, 1994 and the reviews were not kind. David Richards with The New York Times wrote:

"The astonishments rarely cease. Yet, strange as it may sound, that's the very drawback of Beauty and the Beast. Nothing has been left to the imagination. Everything has been painstakingly and copiously illustrated. There is no room for dreaming, no quiet tucked-away moment that might encourage a poetic thought. For an evening that puts forth so much, Beauty and the Beast has amazingly little resonance."

Vincent Canby, also with the Times, was even less forgiving:

"This Beauty and the Beast is the original film clunkily re-enacted at what looks to be great expense, mostly by performers of faceless competence, on sets of sometimes startling ordinariness, in colors that don't offend. There are a couple of lively specialty dancers, but the choreography wouldn't be out of place at a dinner theater."

At a cost of over $12 million--big money for a Broadway show--Beauty and the Beast was viewed by the critics as great spectacle, but not great theater, an opinion Susan thought was unfair. "The material was still great material. I think they went too far in the spectacle route, but the thing that Disney does really well--it was the most expensive Broadway show at that time and you saw every penny of it on the stage, every ounce of it."

Apparently, more than a few people agreed. Beauty and the Beast became a hit with theater-goers and was nominated for nine Tony awards (including one for Susan as Best Actress in a Musical) and ran on Broadway for 13 years. It was especially popular as a date show. "We had more people propose to their fiances at our show," said Susan. "It was pretty amazing."

The musical also defied the naysayers who thought it would never amount to more than a kids' show. Susan heard the warnings that children would be running up and down the aisles during performances. It never happened. "The kids sat quietly because they knew you already. That was the great honor of playing Belle. They already loved you before you even walked on the stage. But, here I got to do an hour's worth of material that wasn't in the movie, to teach them more about this character that they already loved."

Susan would spend a year with the original production followed by another year playing Belle in Los Angeles. Eventually, more Broadway roles followed, with Susan starring in revivals of Cabaret, State Fair and Thoroughly Modern Millie. There would be more Disney in her future too.

Coming Wednesday: Part two of my interview with Susan. It's gonna be a real slice.

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