Actress and Juggler

All the world is a stage for Susan Egan these days--except perhaps during the four hours of sleep the star of Broadway musicals has been getting each night while juggling two demanding new roles.

Best known as the original leading lady of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Triumph of Love,” and for her year playing Sally Bowles in director Sam Mendes’ revival of “Cabaret,” Egan is now taking on a straight drama as the title character in David Hare’s “Amy’s View” at the International City Theatre in Long Beach. She also is debuting in the first day job of her career: as the interim artistic director of the 1,200-student Orange County High School of the Arts in Santa Ana. Sept. 5 was the first day of school; “Amy’s View” opened the following night.

Both endeavors find Egan, at 32, circling back to her beginnings in show business.

In “Amy’s View,” she plays opposite her old friend Carol Lawrence. The loving but destructive mother-daughter relationship they create on stage has gentler parallels in the family feeling between the two actresses. They met in 1990 in a St. Louis production of “No, No, Nanette.” Since then, Lawrence, the original Maria in “West Side Story,” has been known to whip up a lasagna when she thought that Egan was looking a bit too thin as Belle in “Beauty” or Bowles in “Cabaret.” The Center Theater at the Long Beach Performing Arts Center, where “Amy’s View” is being mounted, is where Egan saw her first plays as a girl. She was born in Long Beach and grew up in neighboring Seal Beach.

Egan’s job at the Orange County High School of the Arts also marks a return. In 1988, she was part of the school’s first graduating class; from age 12, she had been mentored by the school’s founder and director, Ralph Opacic. Now Opacic is her boss, having hired her in June when the job of artistic director came open. Both are quick to dispel any notion that Egan, the school’s best-known graduate, will serve as a figurehead. The school has gone through a huge growth spurt since moving from suburban Los Alamitos to downtown Santa Ana two years ago, and Egan and Opacic say this is an important time for fine-tuning arts programs after a hectic period of adjustment.

Egan has set a whirlwind agenda for her yearlong commitment. She laid it out on a recent morning for the school’s 150 faculty members, who gathered in the campus’ 1922-vintage concert hall, a converted church. Egan exudes cheerful energy, seemingly without letup, and sometimes intensifies what she’s saying with her favorite epithet--”gosh!” She bounded on stage and faced her new colleagues, confidently extemporizing a pep talk about her plans.

The actress wants to forge stronger ties between the high school and the world of professional show biz. She aims to make its 80 annual productions run more efficiently, with less last-minute stress and confusion. She thinks teachers in the academic wing, where students spend a full school day, and in the arts conservatory, where they continue for additional late-afternoon instruction, can cooperate more closely so regular classroom subjects resonate with the music, dance, film, theater, creative writing and visual arts programs that lure students to the competitive, by-audition-only public charter school.

Egan earned applause, then was off to do some cheerleading--and critical listening--during several hours of auditions for three performance troupes she is launching to give kids more opportunities to learn their art and connect with audiences outside the school.

Andrea Adnoff, a seventh-grader just entering the school, remembered at the last second to remove the rubber bands from her braces before launching into the torch ballad “Cry Me a River.” Egan wrote “pretty soprano” on her assessment sheet, then encouraged the talented but nervous youngster before she began her second number. “Jump up and down, loosen up. And don’t forget to smile.”

Egan wants to challenge students. When she learned that senior Ryan Mekenian had staged his own independent production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” she followed her instincts and installed him as director of the high school’s big spring musical. Egan loved Mekenian’s offbeat choice: his favorite show, “Parade,” which is based on the infamous 1913 Georgia murder trial of Leo Frank, a Jew who was unjustly convicted and later lynched. The rarely produced 1998 musical ran for only two months on Broadway but won Tony awards for composer Jason Robert Brown and book writer Alfred Uhry.

Opacic says it is unprecedented for a student to direct a show at the high school. “It’s something nobody considered or explored, a perfect way to bring innovation into the school,” he said. “I knew she would provide a great deal of insight and advice, but she’s willing to be hands-on, and that’s spectacular.”

Egan will ride shotgun and aims to round up the original principals of “Parade,” including director Harold Prince, to advise Mekenian by phone. She’s also bringing in “Hello, Dolly!” composer Jerry Herman for a concert and master class. It seems, she is no more than a degree or two of separation--if that--from all of Broadway’s elite, and she aims to use those connections to benefit her students.

Having finished her day job, Egan heads for Long Beach and a 10-hour second shift that would include both the final afternoon rehearsal and the first evening preview performance of “Amy’s View.”

“I don’t know how she does it,” frets Lawrence, her stage mom. “You can’t burn the candle at three ends, and that’s what she’s doing.”

But Egan’s real mom, Nancy Egan, isn’t worried. Soon after her daughter’s graduation 14 years ago, she became an administrative assistant to Opacic and is now the arts high school’s admissions officer. Her desk is right outside Susan’s office.

“I’m not concerned,” mom Egan says. “She can handle it.”

Susan Egan had committed to “Amy’s View” long before becoming a school administrator. She figures she can tough out two jobs for a while. For the rest of the school year, the Los Angeles resident plans to limit herself to parts that won’t take her out of town or consume too much time.

A touch of fatigue, she says, might even help her on stage in “Amy’s View.” Egan’s character is a bright, spirited young Englishwoman who is gradually worn down trying to make peace between her mother, a stage diva, and her husband, a television journalist who alienates Mom because he thinks the theater is passe.

“They both need her full attention, and they split her apart like a wishbone,” Egan says. “I’m getting four hours of sleep a night. I think I’ll be able to manage the haggard scenes.”

Egan trained at UCLA mainly in classic theater before leaving after her junior year to go on the road with Tommy Tune in “Bye, Bye Birdie.” After years of the grueling eight-shows-a-week routine of Broadway and touring musicals, Egan found herself in a comparatively cushy TV gig during 2000 and 2001, playing a Las Vegas showgirl, the sidekick of the title character on the WB network’s now-defunct comedy series “Nikki.” With her nights and weekends free, Egan stepped up her concert performances, recorded “So Far ...,” a CD of show tunes, and honed her dramatic chops at the Blank Theatre Company in Hollywood, where she acted in and served as co-artistic director of a series of staged readings of new plays.

She traces her turn toward serious drama and the serious business of arts education partly to the Sept. 11 attacks. Friends in New York lost loved ones; she says the tattoo of a heart and the letter “M” on the inside of her left wrist is for a friend who is fighting in Afghanistan.

“I really like what ‘Amy’s View’ says, and I really love Carol Lawrence, and that means more to me these days,” she says. “I’m finding the values in things, and that’s why I’m at this school. It’s made me more focused on what matters.”

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“Amy’s View,” Center Theater, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Thursdays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Sept. 29. $27 to $35. (562) 436-4610.

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Mike Boehm is a Times staff writer.