Singing a Different Tune Onstage

As a Soprano, Jamie-Lynn Sigler plays an intriguing teenager whose future is a question mark.

And as a soprano, the pretty, down-to-earth New Yorker gets to warble sweetly and live happily ever after each night.

The actress who plays Meadow Soprano, the conflicted daughter of the complicated Mafia boss on the HBO drama series “The Sopranos” is the fairy-tale heroine of “Cinderella,” the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical that opens tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

Sigler celebrated her 20th birthday May 15 by singing through a bout of strep throat--exemplifying a trouper’s ethic cultivated since she was 9 years old. She began acting and singing in community theater; “Cinderella” is her first high-profile stage role.

Sigler follows in the sooty-faced, glass-slippered footsteps of Julie Andrews (1957), Lesley Ann Warren (1965) and Brandy (1997), who starred in television productions of the show.

Last week in San Diego, Sigler played opposite Fairy Godmother Eartha Kitt, a fiery marvel at 74. Instead of passively waiting for her prince to come, this Cinderella takes to heart Kitt’s lesson that fairy godmothers help those who help themselves.

The morning after the San Diego opening, Sigler’s tanned arms and shoulders were still shining with the sparkly fairy dust that helps make her radiant on stage. The glitter is impossible to scrub off, she said during an interview in the lounge of her hotel. Luckily, the laryngitis that dogged her for more than a month proved a little less persistent, and Sigler thinks she is singing near top form again. She missed two shows in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago--only, she emphasizes, after her doctor insisted on a rest.

“I learned the hard way. This is a party cast, and I was thinking I’m young and invincible and I can go out every night while doing eight shows a week.” Now it’s strictly back to her room after shows to watch DVDs, play computer games, work on songs for her upcoming debut pop album and get eight hours’ nightly sleep.

Kitt ordered up a humidifier for her dressing room to help with her throat problems, Sigler says. “She’s really taken me under her wing, kind of guiding me and giving me advice. This is my first time away from my parents for so long, so it’s nice to have someone watching out for me.”

The soft-spoken Sigler comes off more like an authentic young person than a glibly charming personality-in-the-making. She began playing Meadow at 16, when she was a junior going to a public high school in Jericho, N.Y.

“I was still the same girl walking through the halls. Everyone was really, really cool about it and helped me maintain that normalcy.” Normalcy is clearly something she hopes to hold on to.

Sigler’s reserve melts a little as she talks proudly of how her father, Steve Sigler, single-handedly founded the Men’s Senior Baseball League 15 years ago; the league for players over age 30 has grown from local origins on Long Island to claim 44,000 players nationally in 325 cities. And she doesn’t mind mentioning that during her early teens, “I was a great softball player, actually. I played shortstop and the team was undefeated for four years. My father was so proud.”

Sigler says her family was there for her when, at 16, she had a bout with exercise bulimia, an eating disorder in which sufferers overexercise to keep their weight low. She thinks she latched on to constant exercise because it gave her a sense of control amid the uncertainties of adolescence.

Sigler’s TV father, North Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano, is proud too, but he is a strange piece of work--loving yet hurtful to his family, charming yet brutal in his business. During the past season, Meadow enrolled at Columbia University and promptly found a great boyfriend--only to have racist Daddy scare him off because he was of African American and Jewish parentage. Tony was fond of boyfriend No. 2, mob scion Jackie Aprile Jr., but allowed him to be whacked when it turned out that Jackie--who Meadow thought was not involved with the mob--was caught trying to set up his own little criminal empire on Soprano family turf.

As the show heads into its fourth and, according to recent speculation in the press, possibly final season, Meadow has some issues.

“She’s blaming who she is and who her family is for [Jackie’s] death. It’s going to be really tough,” Sigler said. “I don’t know where she’s headed.”

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Sigler jumped at the chance to play “Cinderella” because “musical theater is where my heart is,” and because the part contrasts nicely with her public image as a moody, troubled and strong-willed Mafia princess.

Gabriel Barre, director of “Cinderella,” says Sigler won him over during auditions with “this wonderful, light soprano sound.”

“A lot of young folk today would probably be more seduced by the world of television and film, but she absolutely loves [theater], and I hope it continues to be important to her,” Barre said. “I’m already looking for [stage] projects she might be right for.”

When “Cinderella” opened last November, Sigler, the first choice for the title role, was tied up shooting “The Sopranos.” Fellow Long Islander and former teen pop star Deborah Gibson took over. Sigler replaced Gibson in March and is signed on through late July--a total of more than 180 performances.

No rest is in the offing. She aims to finish her album for Edel America Records by September. It’s a pop record with Latin and R&B; flavors. Three cuts will be sung in Spanish; Sigler is bilingual, the daughter of a Sephardic Jewish father and a Cuban-born mother, Consuelo, whose family fled after Fidel Castro came to power.

Also ahead is shooting for Sigler’s first starring role in a movie; she says it’s an independent film she can’t discuss, except to say she plays a 17-year-old in a coming-of-age tale that takes place during one night in the 1970s. In October, it’s back to being Meadow--who Sigler says got her unusual name because her parents conceived her during a tryst in the New Jersey Meadowlands.

She also is mulling parts in new musicals being workshopped for possible future Broadway runs.

With opportunities abounding for success--and for failure--Sigler says she is inclined to take to heart some of Kitt’s advice: “ ‘Don’t listen to what anybody tells you you should be doing, only make sure that you’re doing what you want to do and what makes you happy.’ I’m not the kind of person who comes into things with expectations. As long as I’m having a good time, that’s what matters.”

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“Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. Tonight-Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 and 7:30 p.m. $22-$57. (714) 556-2787.