‘Dirty Blonde’ goes West

Kathy Najimy will make her triumphant return to the stage in her hometown of San Diego, which never got her until after off-Broadway made her a star.

When she reprises her leading role in “Dirty Blonde” at the Old Globe Theatre starting tonight in a preview, only one thing will be missing from the lip-smacking, soul-satisfying scenario: the helicopter.

“It’ll be like Bette Midler coming home in ‘The Rose,’ ” Najimy says dreamily, “when she goes back to her hometown and she arrives in a helicopter and she says to the audience, ‘I missed you. Did you miss me?’ ” Najimy hasn’t performed in San Diego since she did “The Kathy and Mo Show” at the San Diego Opera House 15 years ago.

Najimy, 46, is perched on a folding chair in a Burbank rehearsal hall, where a hairstylist is snipping away at her newly blond locks, lightened for her role as the uber dirty blond, Mae West. As a veteran actress, director, wife, mom and political activist, Najimy is a practiced multitasker, and today is just one more juggle in a long line. While a reporter interviews her, she’s getting her hair done for a photo shoot later that day, after which she’ll dash to Hollywood to catch her husband, Dan Finnerty, 33, doing his biweekly, off-kilter rock show at the Highlands as frontman for the eponymous Dan Band.

Najimy’s identification with Midler’s character in “The Rose” notwithstanding, Finnerty is the rock star of the family. Najimy is the one who sees her life as a movie, which isn’t terribly surprising when you consider that a nice chunk of her adulthood actually has been spent appearing on one screen or another, starting with her breakout play (1989) “Kathy & Mo,” which was an HBO comedy special in 1993. In February, Najimy and Mo Gaffney will resurrect the hilarious multicharacter skit-fest -- which ran on and off around the country for nine years -- at Beverly Hills’ Canon Theatre, before taking it to New York.

Back to her life-movie. Here’s the scene that led to her 1999 Broadway debut in “Dirty Blonde.” It was one of those deus ex machina moments that never really happen.

“I was doing this movie that turned out to be a horrible experience -- I can’t say the name, but you’ll figure it out,” says Najimy, who lives in Laurel Canyon with Finnerty and their 6-year-old daughter, Samia. “The script wasn’t great, I hated my character and they had lied to me about locations. I had my family with me and I wasn’t in the place they had said I was going to be. We were in Nevada someplace. It wasn’t even Vegas, which would have been bearable, but some crazy ghost town you had to take four planes to get to. I was sitting on the bed in a musty, horrible hotel room with my husband, and I said, ‘This is it. I’m not acting anymore. I’m done.’”

Rrrrrrriiiiinnnnngggg.

It’s a phone call from her agent saying a Broadway director she worships wants to talk to her. “It was like a scene in a movie. ‘What do you mean, the James Lapine?’ I call him back and he says, ‘Kathy, we want you to do “Dirty Blonde” on Broadway.’ And of course that gave me a whole other spark and energy, because it was such a great experience with a great director, great writer, great actors. The whole experience re-fed me.”

It was a trickier transition than Najimy gives herself credit for surfing. She was replacing Claudia Shear, who had not only starred in “Dirty Blonde,” she had written it as a vehicle for herself. The show earned five Tony nominations and critical raves, with the New York Times declaring “Blonde” “the best new American play of the season.”

In December 1999, after nine months in the role, Shear left New York for the London production. And even though Najimy’s name packs considerable marquee punch because of her high-profile film roles as the funny witch in “Hocus Pocus” (1993) and the funny nun in “Sister Act” (1992) and “Sister Act 2” (1993) as well as her three-year stint as Olive on the NBC sitcom “Veronica’s Closet,” some critics were skeptical that Shear could be replaced.

Clive Barnes said as much in his review for the New York Post. “Was there life for Claudia Shear’s ‘Dirty Blonde’ after Claudia Shear ... left the production? Frankly, I doubted it. Frankly, I was wrong.... Najimy gave her own slant (or curve) on the inimitable Mae. She provided a triumphant object lesson in how the West was won. With sheer gusto!”

And that was in the face of Broadway pressures and New York blizzards, which turned her life on its head.

“It was a crazy, frantic situation,” says Najimy, who has also been doing the voice of wife Peggy Hill on Fox TV’s “King of the Hill” for eight seasons.

“I moved my whole family to New York. It was Christmastime, so I shipped all my Christmas decorations, all my Christmas presents and got to New York and set up house. And then I had to learn this Broadway show in nine days. I don’t remember one performance because it was so crazy.”

Fortunately, Old Globe artistic director Jack O’Brien did. He was in New York at the time, directing Tom Stoppard’s Tony-nominated “The Invention of Love” when he got a call from Najimy inviting him to see the show. Najimy had known O’Brien for many years, first as a fan of his directing and later as a performer -- the Globe mounted an early workshop production of “Kathy & Mo.”

O’Brien recalls that Najimy called him three times that day, finally announcing that she’d left a ticket for him at the box office. Impressed with her sheer pluck, he went.

“You know how you think you know somebody and then you realize you don’t know them?” O’Brien says. “If that was Kathy Najimy up there, I’d missed a couple of important chapters. She was absolutely riveting. I knew she could be funny and witty and clever and entertaining. I wasn’t completely aware that she could resonate.

“I went backstage and said, ‘This is great work.’ And she said, ‘I want to do it at the Globe.’ And that, as they say in the business, is how I met your grandmother.”

O’Brien gave her the chance she was looking for -- to do it again with a little more time, a little more grounded, as Najimy puts it. The San Diego cast also includes Kevin Chamberlin and Bob Stillman, who both originated the Broadway roles that earned them Tony nominations. The show opens Saturday after a week of previews.

Not an impersonation

Najimy actually plays two roles in “Dirty Blonde,” which follows two story lines: one, an impressionistic telling of the formidable West’s life story, and another, a love story between Jo, an aspiring actress and rabid West fan also played by Najimy, and Charlie (Stillman), another West devotee and film librarian who meet cute at the sex diva’s grave site.

The part meets all three criteria for Najimy’s roles -- it’s feminist, funny and flawed. The show was inspired by a New Yorker profile of West, which revealed her to be a female Horatio Alger, a ferociously successful and ambitious businesswoman and sexual pioneer who wrote her own movies and plays, a woman who was entirely self-made when most women were not. Lapine was intrigued by the story and invited Shear to write the play.

“The part is not an impersonation of Mae West as much as it is someone who has the essence of Mae West, which is a kind of self-assured, self-possessed sexiness and enjoyment of herself,” says Gareth Hendee, the director of this production who also acted as Lapine’s associate director for the Broadway run. “The main thing that set Mae West apart was that she was really confident as a woman. She presented herself to the world as, ‘This is who I am. Take it.’ And I think Kathy has that quality.”

Or, as Lapine told Najimy, “If I wanted an impersonation, I would have hired a drag queen.”

Najimy, who has spoken around the country about feminist issues, gay and lesbian rights, AIDS awareness and animal protection, identifies strongly with the zaftig West’s ability to redefine beauty for herself. After losing 100 pounds in the mid-’90s, she’s the size of an average American woman. Of course that still flies in the face of Hollywood’s intense pressure to be thin, and Najimy is a vocal critic of what she calls “a dangerous epidemic” of girls responding with eating disorders.

“It’s been a huge detriment and gift in my life,” Najimy says of her weight. “It would be a lie for me to say it’s never been a problem, but I live in this world where the last acceptable thing you can be as a woman is fat.”

“Certainly as far as Hollywood standards go, I’ve never been what you’re supposed to be. It’s been hard a lot, but then part of me just doesn’t care. It’s not because I came up with this on my own. It’s because of the women who came before me. It’s because of Bette Midler and the women’s movement and Mae West. They took the idea of what a movie star is or a rock [star] and redesigned it to fit themselves. They didn’t have to trick people into thinking it. They made them come to reason that there’s not just one way to be that’s acceptable.”

*

‘Dirty Blonde’

Where: Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego

When: Opens Saturday. Runs Tuesday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 7 p.m.; Saturday-Sunday, 2 p.m.

Ends: Aug. 30

Price: $19-$50

Contact: (619) 239-2255