Ok, Mother Nature, I get it. It’s winter.

Wowza, it is cold out! I’m very thankful I’m going to deliciously warm places this month! First up, Las Vegas. Every year, I go to The Smith Center and introduce the upcoming season of musicals. They send me the list in advance and its top secret...meaning all I want to do is tell people what’s on it.

Side note: When my sister Nancy got pregnant, she was told not to tell anyone until the third month. Of course, Nancy is exactly like me in terms of keeping secrets, so she couldn’t help revealing the news to a few select people. And by “select,” she told me that when the third month finally came, she had no one left to tell. Seriously!

Anyhoo, I’m sent the list of the upcoming musicals that will be touring to The Smith Center, and I prepare deconstructions of why Las Vegas audiences must see every single one. I love doing it and I’m happy that they’ve now started livestreaming my reveals! I’ll post the link next week.

Last year, after my Smith Center season announcement, I debuted my newest show, Divas by the Decade, during which I deconstruct the amazing women from the 1950s to today whose brilliant performances have made a tremendous impact on Broadway. My friend David Katz designed the projections which features each diva on an old-school baseball card and lists stats like their classic roles and the “diva ingredient,” aka what makes them special. For instance: One of Betty Buckley's diva ingredients is her pure vowels. I can’t tell you how crazy I get when I hear the word “me” become “may!”

Watch her brilliance!

I have performed Divas by the Decade around the country as well as in London. After each performance, I kept remembering another sasstress I needed to add to the show. Finally, I realized there were so many incredible women who I hadn’t featured, that I would need to present a brand-new show called Divas by the Decade Part Two. Yes! A sequel will premiere at The Smith Center on Tuesday Feb 10. Tickets are available here!

Also, I’m going to do a section where I show new videos about some of the brilliant women I featured last time. Last year, I was backstage with Jessie Mueller before one of our shows and she was playing me a recording of her son, Ollie, screaming in happiness. I realized Ollie was nailing a high E above high C and devised a plan for that night’s concert! If you don’t know, one of the fun parts of my concerts is that they’re not scripted. I often “force” the star to sing things they have never rehearsed or sung before. I’m always surprising my guests with something! That concert had both a challenge and a surprise in the same moment. Here’s what happened.

Jessie and I were talking about how she had always wanted to play Christine in The Phantom of the Opera. I mentioned that if she didn’t want to hit the high E in the title song eight times a week, they could play a pre-record of Ollie. She didn’t quite know what I meant, but we went to the piano and I had her start singing the famous, “Sing for me!” obligato. She kept going until she hit the final High Cs over and over. When it finally got to the high E, I held my iPhone up to the mic and played the tape of Ollie nailing it. It was hilarious because it fit perfectly. 

Watch!

P.S. If you want to see me and Jessie in person, get thee to NJPAC.

The other week, I did a super fun podcast called Go Fact Yourself, hosted by J. Keith van Straaten and Helen Hong. My “opponent” was the hilarious Julie Klausner, creator and co-star of Difficult People. She and I were told to submit three topics on which we are “experts” and then the show would pick one. Well, out of mine—natural disasters, Brady Bunch Variety Hour, and Carly Simon—they chose Carly Simon! I love Carly Simon’s music so much and put two of her songs in my Broadway show Disaster! (“That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be” and “Mockingbird”). 

Here’s a deconstruction I did of the first song mentioned, before I even wrote Disaster!.

Anyhoo, one of the aspects of the podcast is that the hosts bring on an expert at the end of your segment to tell you if your answers are correct. Well, who appeared via Zoom but Sally Taylor, Carly Simon and James Taylor’s daughter! She was Zooming from where she lives…in Nova Scotia. Why there? She told us that she always thought it was an exotic place because she heard about when she was a kid in the song “You’re So Vain.” (“Then you flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia.”) I loved finding that out! 

Sally told us what a special childhood she had surrounded by so many incredible artists. She summed her childhood up by saying if you weren’t singing a fifth harmony line in the kitchen, you were judged! As a matter of fact, it wasn’t until she was older that she found out families at dinner didn’t set “please pass the potatoes” to music. It sounds fun…but exhausting! I got to tell Sally how obsessed I am with her mom and was thrilled to know that even though Carly was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease a few years ago, she is working on new music. Yay!

Julie Klausner’s “expert” category options were Jewish celebrities, cats (the animals, not the upcoming revival), and John Waters films. They wound up choosing John Waters films and the segment was so much fun. She really knew her stuff! The expert that came on was Ricki Lake, Tracy Turnblad from the original Hairspray film. 

I’ve known Ricki for years and put her in my Actors Fund Funny Girl concert back in 2002. If you don’t know, I had a different Fanny in that concert for each scene and song (Whoopi Goldberg, Sutton Foster, Kristin Chenoweth, Jane Krakowski, Ana Gasteyer, etc). Ricki played Fanny in the scene where she first meets Nicky Arnstein (played by the dreamy Peter Gallagher) in her dressing room. She was delightful! Through the years, she’s had a lot of heartache, including losing her house in the L.A. fires, but she is an eternal optimist. She told us that she really is Tracy Turnblad.

And, speaking of that Funny Girl concert, here is a deconstruction of Lillias White bringing down the house at the end of Act One with “Don’t Rain on My Parade.”

Lillias and Arielle Jacobs will be joining me on my upcoming Seth’s Big Fat Broadway Cruise. They will also sing at a concert I’m doing the day after we dock in Fort Lauderdale; on February 22, I’ll be with them at the Miramar Cultural Arts Center. And yes, Lillias will be doing “Don’t Rain on My Parade”! Tickets are available here.

Back to Ricki Lake, she got the Hairspray audition when she was a freshman musical theatre major. It was a hard time for her. One of her teachers had just told her she would never make it because she wasn’t talented (maybe Mr. Carp didn’t die and instead started teaching college level theatre?) and her boyfriend had just broken up with her. She was overweight at the time and blamed herself for the breakup, thinking it was because of how she looked. She later found out, he soon came out as gay!

Regardless, she drove down from college (getting a speeding ticket on the way) and auditioned for John Waters himself. She soon got the role that changed her life. Ricki wasn’t familiar with his work, and he forbid her from watching any of his previous films. I’m assuming he didn’t want her to be influenced by his sometimes campy/dark/over-the-top/amazingly bizarre style. He wanted her to do exactly what she did at her audition. Julie asked how Ricki learned all those dances from the '60s and, turns out, John Waters filmed himself doing the boogaloo, the mashed potato, etc. so she could watch and learn. She had all his video tutorials on VHS but, devastatingly, lost them in the fire.

Speaking of the fire, losing her house made her decide to move back to NYC which is a happy ending to a horrific event. As for who won Go Fact Yourself, you’ll have to tune it to find out. Visit their site or listen wherever you listen to podcasts!

Finally, speaking of Hairspray, I had the brilliant composer and co-lyricist Marc Shaiman on Seth Speaks this week. His highly entertaining autobiography just came out, it’s called Never Mind the Happy. In case you haven’t heard the hilarious story behind the title, it’s inspired by a phone call between Marc’s sister and his mom. His sister called his mom on New Year’s Day and said, “Let me be the first to wish you a happy and a healthy New Year.” Their mother immediately said, “Never mind the happy!” That, Marc says, explains why he is the way he is.

But for all his implying that he is an “Eeyore,” the book is filled with so much joy. And so many incredible showbiz stories. Not just lots about Broadway, but also his incredible career in film and television. I’m talking about Sister Act, City Slickers, The Addams Family, Beaches, When Harry Met Sally, South Park, Smash, Saturday Night Live, and so many more! Marc also included stories from the Oscars (writing for Billy Crystal’s hilarious opening number) and playing for the final episode of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show. Of course, he has plenty of inside scoop on the recording industry, like the times he spent recording with Bette Midler, Harry Connick Jr., Mariah Carey, Angela Lansbury, and so many more. The book is filled with lots of highs (which he calls “plotz,” a Jewish word for what you do when you’re happy) and lots of lows (which he calls a “zets,” a Jewish word for getting slapped). He thinks he always has a zets after a plotz, but often they go the other way round. 

At one point in the book, he talks about being fired by a major Hollywood bigwig the first time he was asked to write music for a film….to a few years later having that very same Hollywood bigwig call him into a private meeting, asking him to use his close relationship with Bette Midler to see if she’d be willing to replace Whoopi Goldberg in Sister Act!

There’s an amazing chapter on working with Barbra Streisand hilariously peppered with Marilyn Bergman asking him over and over again, “Tell me exactly what you said to Marty Erlichman…”

During my Seth Speaks interview with him, Marc talked about listening to the audiobook version of Barbra’s autobiography. We commiserated on how Barbra takes her time with every word, syllable… and pause. Marc told me that as he listened, he kept speeding up the playback until she finally sounded like old-school Brooklyn Barbra. Basically, going from dressed-in-flowing- white-Donna-Karan-clad-Barbra… to Artful-Dodger-capped, “What’s up, Doc?” Barbra. “Congratulations! Condolences.” IYKYK

I was so honored to be invited to Marc’s book release at Sardi’s and, holy cow, was it star-studded! What made it so moving to me was seeing these incredible artists watching Marc play some of the wonderful songs he had written with Scott Wittman and seeing the deep respect and love they have for him.

Artists appreciating a great artist? Yass!

My episode of Seth Speaks with Marc Shaiman is available on the SiriusXM to listen to whenever you want!

I was recording the Go Fact Yourself podcast when the soirée began but came over afterwards just in time to hear Shoshana Bean sing one of my favorite songs ever, “Fly, Fly Away.” Man, it is so, so, so beautiful. I was actually in the moment and didn’t film it, but here is Marc playing that gorgeous song at the 2025 Broadway Dreams Gala. I love it so much.

This week is the one-year anniversary of when James and I played Wilbur and Edna in Marc and Scott’s masterpiece, Hairpsray. I’ll send the column off with a clip of us from the very first performance singing the Act Two love song. 

Watch, buy Marc’s book, write a review on Amazon and Goodreads which makes a huge difference, and peace out!