Originally published in the Bay Area Reporter
Betsy Wolfe
Over the past few years, Betsy Wolfe has played major roles in four Broadway musicals: “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” “Bullets Over Broadway,” “Falsettos,” and “Waitress.” But the fans who wait for her autograph at stage doors frequently ask about a production that never made it to Manhattan.
“After almost every show,” Wolfe says, clearly savoring the thought, “people bring up ‘Tales of the City.'” Wolfe, who will debut her first-ever cabaret show “All Bets Are Off” at Feinstein’s at the Nikko next week, starred as Mary Ann Singleton in the 2011 world-premiere production of the “Tales” musical at A.C.T. Coming just five years into her professional career, the sly, soap-operatic love letter to 1970s San Francisco marked the first time Wolfe had originated a lead role, having been with the production through two years of workshops. “I’d done my fair share of labs and workshops before,” Wolfe recalls, “but nothing that had ever come to fruition.”
Wolfe’s performance in “Tales” was praised by critics as “superb,” “sensational” and “utterly charming.” While a Broadway transfer never materialized, the show became a calling card, clearly establishing her as leading-lady material.
“From the very first time I saw her perform, I could see she was a star,” says Armistead Maupin, author of the “Tales of the City” novels from which the musical was adapted by a creative team including Scissor Sisters’ Jake Shears. Maupin remarks that Wolfe, like Laura Linney, who played Mary Ann in the television version of “Tales,” is “really good at playing someone who has an innocence, but also has a lot of smarts going on behind her surface.”
When Wolfe co-produced the only Broadway performance of “Tales” – a concert version last year, benefitting the Trevor Project and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center – Maupin flew east to read his novels’ first chapter as part of the show. He says he wouldn’t consider missing the Feinstein’s shows next week, where Wolfe promises to include “Paper Faces,” her stunning 11 o’clock solo from “Tales.”
Wolfe’s association with “Tales” is just one of the reasons she says it’s a “no-brainer to start my mini-tour here.” Having grown up four hours south in Visalia, her first professional gig after graduating from the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music was a nine-month San Francisco run of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” in 2006. In 2015 she returned to A.C.T. in a concert performance of Jason Robert Brown’s two-person romance “The Last Five Years.”
“I feel safe in San Francisco,” Wolfe says, noting that as much as she looks forward to premiering her solo show, the intimacy of cabaret is still a tad daunting. In preparing “All Bets Are Off,” Wolfe dug into her childhood journals, seeking autobiographical threads to help her build a throughline and set list.
“That girl was destined to be an actress,” she observes of her younger self. “My older sister was doing local theater, and I am very competitive, so I initially started because I wanted to keep up with her. But pretty shortly, I realized that I loved it. I never questioned that this was what I was going to do with my life. I just felt at home on the stage.”
While Wolfe’s set will incorporate songs she’s performed in musicals, she’s also picked numbers associated with roles she’s only dreamed of playing. And she’ll revisit songs that have been a part of her life off-stage.
“I felt very close to Billy Joel’s ‘Summer Highland Falls’ at a young age, not even really understanding the lyrics. I still love the song, but it means so many more things to me now. It’s an incredible challenge to reconceptualize something and re-explore it.”
That’s a skill Wolfe brought to bear in her run as Jenna in “Waitress” on Broadway, stepping into a role that was based on a film character, and had just been played by the show’s composer, Sara Bareilles.
“I had never replaced before. It’s very different than originating a role in a revival. There’s a danger that you step in and become a cog in a wheel that’s already rolling. But for ‘Waitress,’ they gave me free reign to make it my own. I had five weeks of rehearsal time before I went in.
“In the business that we’re in,” Wolfe says of commercial musical theater, “most of the shows getting produced are based on things already familiar to audiences. Even ‘Tales’ and Mary Ann Singleton. It’s a sign of the times.
“It would be easy to say that I don’t want to do a role unless nobody else has done it before, but I think a lot of that is fear-based. I take great pride in figuring out how to make something newly relevant and give it a fresh take.”
