When two-time Tony Award winner Christine Ebersole (42nd Street, Grey Gardens) steps out on the Maltz Jupiter Theatre stage Saturday night, it should feel a little familiar to her.
Told that the venue used to be the Burt Reynolds Dinner Theatre, she perks up on the telephone. “Oh, well, that’s where I worked,” says Ebersole in a flat Midwestern voice that suggests her Winnetka, Ill., upbringing. “I did ‘Guys and Dolls’ there in ’85. Charles Nelson Reilly directed.”
She returns here a star of Broadway (Blithe Spirit, Steel Magnolias, Camelot), movies (Tootsie, Amadeus, Wolf of Wall Street) and television (Saturday Night Live, Royal Pains, Sullivan and Son). On Saturday, she follows in the legendary footsteps of Brian Stokes Mitchell and Chita Rivera, headlining this season’s Tony Award winner benefit concert series.
The evening will feature “songs from the American Songbook and Broadway shows,” says Ebersole, but certainly selections from Grey Gardens, the musical based on the Maysles Brothers 1976 documentary, the show that cemented her place on the Broadway A-list and earned her a second Tony. In it she played the dual roles of Big and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, the once wealthy, then destitute, aunt and cousin of Jackie Kennedy.
Although she calls the show her most memorable stage work to date, helping to develop it and perform it over a two-and-a-half-year period took its toll on Ebersole. “It was a very rewarding experience for me, but I definitely had to take a break from it,” she allows. “I think I wanted to shift my focus to television and film. Because frankly, ‘Grey Gardens’ was a hard act to follow. In a sense I feel that I hoisted my flag on the summit, y’know?”
Assesssing her career, she says, “I worked a ton in L.A., in movies and television, but it doesn’t have the same kind of fulfillment as the stage. For me. I think that’s where my strengths lie. That’s probably why I had to come back to New York — to come back to Kansas after being in Oz. The fact is there’s no place like home, just like Dorothy says.”
In the early ’80s, when Ebersole was an admitted novice at making movies, she lucked into starting at the top in a couple of classics — Tootsie and Amadeus. “I know; where do you go from there?” she asks.
She readily concedes that she had no idea what an impact those two films would make. “No, I was so naïve. I thought, ‘Who’s gonna come and see a movie about Mozart?’ Meanwhile, eight Academy Awards later, I guess a few people came. I mean, I understood the importance of the film, but I thought it was going to be like some little indie movie, an art house film.”
Worse, she grappled with whether or not to take the role of opera diva Katerina Cavalieri in Amadeus, because she was cast at the same time in Amityville Horror 3D.
“They were going to shoot it in Mexico and I was trying to make it work so I could also go to Czechoslovakia and do ‘Amadeus.’ Well, the night before I was supposed to leave for Mexico, the producer from ‘Amityville Horror 3D’ called me and said, ‘Listen, kid, you’re going to have to make up your mind. What’s it going to be?’
“And the irony was that ‘Amadeus’ was shot non-union, so I never got a penny of residuals or anything like that. Meanwhile, I was going to make a lot of money from ‘Amityville.’ Over three times the money I was going to make on ‘Amadeus.’ I, of course, being the kind of person I am, wasn’t great at saving money. I needed the money, but I somehow knew the importance of this movie. I chose art over commerce, I suppose.”
Just prior to Amadeus, Ebersole had another heady showcase as a cast member on Saturday Night Live, for the 1981-82 season.
“It felt like I was shot out of a cannon,” she recalls. “I had just come off the road doing Guenevere with Richard Burton and then Richard Harris. And then thrown into this ring of stand-up comedians. It was really otherworldly, to say the least. I think I was hired because they wanted a singer. That’s really the place where I found my courage, to have more confidence in myself.”
But why only one season, Christine? “Because my contract was not renewed,” she says matter-of-factly. “And Julia Louis-Dreyfus replaced me and the rest is history.”
Still, Ebersole is a Broadway baby and, just last week, it was announced that she signed for a new musical that is likely to take her back to The Great White Way. In Chicago next summer, she will co-star with Patti LuPone in War Paint, about the 50-year rivalry between cosmetics giants Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein, written by the Grey Gardens creative team.
But first, you can see her, one night only, at the Maltz. There she promises all who attend an entertaining time. As Ebersole puts it, “It’s just an evening of fun and frivolity.”
AN EVENING WITH CHRISTINE EBERSOLE, Maltz Jupiter Theatre, 1001 E, Indiantown Road, Jupiter. Saturday, Nov. 21, at 8 p.m. Tickets begin at $50. Phone: (561) 575-2223.