By The New York Times (Americas) | Created at 2024-09-27 15:13:10 | Updated at 2024-09-30 05:29:42
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Two years after debuting the “Titanic” parody, Marla Mindelle says her new show, with Margot Robbie as a producer, may be her last as an actor.
Sept. 27, 2024, 11:00 a.m. ET
There is a trail of trash cans plastered with Marla Mindelle’s face along the 10-minute walk from the Daryl Roth Theater in Union Square, where her musical “Titaníque” has been playing since 2022, to the Orpheum in the East Village, where her latest, “The Big Gay Jamboree,” is in previews.
Her face on the poster advertises both shows, and she sees that advertising placement strategy as God (and the shows’ marketing teams) doing some light trolling: retribution for her style of satire. Mindelle, a writer and performer who struck gold with the Céline Dion jukebox parody, “Titaníque,” years after calling it quits on her small Broadway roles, slings the type of vulgar, musical-theater in-jokes only someone with a deep love of (and knowing frustration with) the industry can get away with.
It’s that same sense of humor that lifted “Titaníque” from a basement theater in Chelsea into a commercial Off Broadway hit, and is now at work in “The Big Gay Jamboree,” Mindelle’s first musical with an original score.
Unlike “Titaníque,” a purposely unpretentious spoof of the James Cameron blockbuster film, “Jamboree” is an elaborately staged show about wanting to leave the world of musicals and is being produced in part by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap company.
Mindelle, 40, sees it as her performing swan song.
At a cafe across from the theater where the new production will open on Sept. 30, she detailed what she views as a life of being comically at odds with her chosen profession.
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