A Conversation with Anastasia Barzee
On Merrily, meeting Sondheim, and much more besides
From classical musician to celebrated stage and screen actress, Anastasia Barzee's journey into musical theatre began almost by accident. After entering the University of Miami's musical theatre program, she discovered her passion for the art form through formative encounters with works like Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella and Stephen Sondheim's Follies. In this wide-ranging conversation, Barzee reflects on her storied career, including her acclaimed turn as Beth in the Kennedy Center’s landmark production of Merrily We Roll Along, where she worked closely with Sondheim himself. Our conversation begins below:
It’s so good to meet you. I’d love to start by asking about your route into musical theatre in general—and I’m fascinated too by how Sondheim fits into that story.
For the first part of your question, I really stumbled into musical theatre. I did not grow up loving musicals, knowing musicals, having albums of musicals. I was not that girl. I was a musician first. I had played piano since a very young age, and I played flute too. I did flute competitions and piano competitions, and that was really my world. I volunteered at the Miami Dade Auditorium as an usher so that I could see all the symphonies that came through. We did musicals at our high school, but of course I played in the pit. They weren’t really part of my world at all—until I was auditioning for university.
I auditioned for the University of Miami, and I auditioned to be a flute major with a piano minor. I got in, but they weren’t really giving any substantial scholarship, and I came from a very low-income family. My father died when I was quite young and we just didn’t have any money for university. University of Miami is a private university, so it’s very expensive. I luckily was best friends with a girl named Susan Gardner, whose mother taught in the opera department. And she said, “You know what? Anastasia sings. Does she have any interest in the musical theatre department? It’s brand new—and the fact that she’s a strong musician, maybe she could offer to accompany people and that might be a way to get her in.”
I had seen one musical, Cats, in London. That’s the only musical I had ever seen. But here I am. I go in the band room at my high school and I sing three songs into one of those old-fashioned tape recorders. And so I got into the University of Miami’s brand new musical theatre program through the music department. One of my stipulations, sure enough, was to do accompanying—and that gave me a partial scholarship. But I took voice lessons for the first time in my life. I was 18 years old, and that’s when I started taking voice lessons and learning about musical theatre.
After the first semester, I got called into the dean’s office, and I was terrified that they were going to take away my scholarship. The dean sat me down and he said, “We see you’re working really hard and your voice is really growing, and we’d like to take some of the pressure off you. We’re not going to ask you to accompany any more.” I had been spending hours and hours learning pieces on piano, when my major was musical theatre. And he said, “And we’re going to give you a real scholarship.” So that’s really when I felt, “Oh, wait a minute. They wouldn’t be giving me this if they didn’t think I could do it.” I was no longer free labor. I was actually a real student of musical theatre.
So, it was really not until college that I learned about musical theatre. I did a lot of opera, and I had one professor, who I loved so much, who introduced me to Sondheim. He introduced me to The Most Happy Fella, by Frank Loesser, and he introduced me to Follies. And those were the two musicals that I was like, “Oh, these are good.” I loved the score of The Most Happy Fella. It still remains one of my favorite scores—it’s just glorious, and very operatic actually, which is probably why my ear went to it. And then with Follies, I just thought it was just the most magnificent combination of lyric and melody that I’d ever experienced. The way that he puts them together is just magic. And the storytelling… There’s no way to articulate the brilliance.
So, those were my first two introductions to a real love and understanding of musical theatre—and I’ve gotten to do both shows! I did The Most Happy Fella out here in Los Angeles. I got to play Rosabella, and it was such a beautiful production. And then I just did Follies, playing Sally, out here in Los Angeles also.
Did that feel like a bit of a full-circle moment, to finally step into Sally’s shoes after decades of revering that musical?
Oh, yeah. It was the weirdest thing, because I still have the music from college. I still have a box that has a lot of my opera stuff and a couple of musical theatre things—and one of them is selections from Follies. One of the selections was the first number that Sally Durant sings. And I remember learning it, going, “Oh my God, I think I have this from 1988.” And sure enough, I went through the box—it’s yellow and it has weird little holes in it from some moth or something. So, yeah… Very full-circle. And very satisfying, for sure.
And that’s quite appropriate for a show like Follies, isn’t it? Those characters are being haunted in a sense by their younger selves. I’d imagine the person you were when you first discovered that show had no sense of where your career might end up going from there—the roads you have and haven’t taken…
No idea. No idea at all. We have our hopes and our dreams, but we have no idea where we go. And also, that show is so much about relationships. What you know about love and about relationships at 18 to 22 is vastly different from what you know of love and relationships as a woman in her fifties. That’s what’s so poignant, I think, about that musical: every age group responds to it in a significant manner, and every age group responds to it in a different way. The young people look at it and go, “Oh my God, I would never let that happen in my life. I would never end up like Sally. I would never stay in a marriage and be unhappy like her.” That’s what a young person’s version of that story is. And then you talk to people my age and older, and they’re like, “Oh my God…” We have so much more understanding of how things happen, and what we put up with, and why we stay in marriages, and why we leave.
That brings us rather nicely to Merrily, in which of course you can’t help but look backwards… That’s another show that I think resonates for people of different ages in radically different ways. When you played Beth in that iconic Kennedy Center production of Merrily, was there a part of her timeline, her story, that you found yourself identifying with most strongly?
I’m a little spooky this way, but I feel like shows come to me exactly when they’re supposed to. When I did Merrily at Kennedy Center, I had just come back from London. I did Napoleon at the Shaftesbury, and I went through a divorce. I came back to Los Angeles, I got cast in Merrily, and while I’m in rehearsals for Merrily, my divorce was finalized. And here I am playing this woman who in the span of Merrily has this wonderful little romance, gets married, and then goes on to find out that as he gains success Frank cheats on her, and then they get a divorce. It was like a mirror. It was so spooky to me, and just exactly on cue how shows find you when they’re supposed to find you.
At Kennedy Center, I think we had a very strong cast. It was Michael Hayden, Miriam Shor, Raúl Esparza, Emily Skinner, Adam Heller, and me. We were all still in the prime of our musical theatreland age, but we all had lived enough and had experienced enough. We all had been through enough dirt to be able to play the beginning of the play. We all had gone through enough so that it wasn’t young kids pretending to have lived in darkness. We all had successes, failures, big breakups. It was a very special group. I do like it skewed a little older. I think this most recent cast on Broadway is more like who we were at the time, in our 30s. And I think it works so beautifully. You have to be able to play the beginning of the play, for my money.
And I’d imagine that one’s own life experience plays a big part in unlocking a song like “Not A Day Goes By.” I’d love to know a little more about how you found your way into that number in particular.
That song, for me, is so melancholic. It’s such a mixture of deep sadness, but also reverence to what Beth and Frank had. There’s a respect for what they had. I’ve seen it played where she’s very angry, and I don’t think that that’s right. At least it’s not right for me, having been someone who was married. I’m very happily married now, and we’ve been together for 20 years—but at the time, I married young. Beth did too. There’s this pretence of, “Everything is going to be great. We just have so much fun together.” And that can all fall apart very quickly. So, when something like that happens, you don’t necessarily get angry. You get sad. You get your heart broken and you feel shame and you feel this longing. Like, “Wait, but there was all this good stuff. How do I get back to that? How am I ever going to get past this feeling of sadness and shame and melancholy, and this longing for what we were reaching for?” So for me, there’s this confusion and sadness, and also this longing for that love. Where does that love go? Because you love somebody so much that you say, “I’m going to spend the rest of my life with you.” Where does that go? It doesn’t go anywhere. It’s always there.
I think that by the time Beth’s on those courthouse steps, she’s already gone through anger. She’s already gone through those things. At this point, she’s just mystified. Like, “What happened?” So I always sang it like that: with deep hurt, but also deep love for him. “I don’t understand. Now I’m just crying and sweating and reaching,” and so on. That head-spinning kind of feeling. So, that’s how I found her. It was based a lot on what was going on in my life, which I always find the most interesting thing in acting. If you can find something in your life that can substitute into whoever you’re playing, whether it’s a movie, a television show, a musical, or a play, it’s always going be more interesting.
Do you have any particular memories of Sondheim himself that stand out when you think back to that time?
He was there all the time. That summer, we did six Sondheims—they were done in rep. We called it Camp Sondheim. We had T-shirts made, the whole thing. Mr. Sondheim was always sitting in on rehearsals. There’s a big cafeteria at the Kennedy Center. He would be in that cafeteria, eating a lot of tuna salad. You could sit and chat with him. Once we started doing the shows, he was at the bar right across the street from the Watergate Hotel every night. He would be there, sitting in a booth, and if you wanted to go by and say hello and sit down, he was very welcoming and lovely.
I did not meet him at my audition, because my audition was filmed. He must have seen it, because I know he had to okay everyone. But the first time I met him in person, we were just putting the show together. We had come to the scene on the courthouse steps, and in walked Stephen Sondheim. And I was like, “Oh god, you’ve got to be kidding me. This is how I meet him?” This was the first time that I sang the song in front of the cast in the context of the show. Mr. Sondheim walks in and I was, rightfully, terrified. It’s weird: when I'm in certain situations, I can get very nervous and I turn bright red. I’ve controlled that now as I’ve gotten older, but I’m sure that I was bright red then. I sang the song, and of course at the end of it there’s the “day after day after day” and so on. I think I missed a couple, or I missed at least one… I looked at him him like, “Oh, God…” And he smiled at me and he said, “Anastasia, there are seven of them, just like the days of the week.” And I’ll never forget it. It was the perfect ice-breaking moment. I laughed, the whole cast laughed, and he could not have been sweeter and more lovely. He was the nicest man in the world. He really, really was.
I shared a dressing room with Emily Skinner, and he would come in every couple of nights with notes. He gave me one that I’ll never forget, that was so great. He said, “I think you could get a bigger laugh on your line, “I thought it was autumn.” There’s a scene where she’s at the party at Gussie’s house, and people are smoking weed around her. There’s something about, “Oh, it smells like the West Village in here,” or something like that. And I say, “I thought it was autumn.” The joke is, of course, that the burning leaves smell like weed. And he said, “I think you can get a bigger laugh if you just look out at the audience and say it, as if you’re smelling Greenwich Village that way.” I did it, and it was the biggest laugh I’ve ever gotten in my life. And it was just so indicative of how well this man knew his own material, and what worked and what didn’t work. He was so spot on. And people would come see the show and go, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen that line get a laugh like that.” And I said, “That wasn’t me. I was doing it wrong. That was all Mr. Sondheim.”
My brother is a criminal defense attorney in Miami. He came up to visit me and see the show, and Mr. Sondheim was there. I said, “Stephen, this is my brother, Bill.” And he says, “Oh, nice to meet you, Bill.” He says, “Bill, what do you do?” And Bill says, “Oh, I’m a criminal defense attorney.” And Mr. Sondheim said, “Come sit with me.” He took my brother outside, and he talked to him for two hours. And I asked Bill, “What were you talking about with Stephen Sondheim?!” And he’s like, “He just wanted to talk about law.” And that’s who he was. He sat there with my brother for two hours and ate and drank, and didn’t talk about theatre once, because he wanted to learn more about criminal law.
It’s so hard to talk about him in the past tense. It really does still feel so weird. What made him such a great storyteller and such a wonderful lyricist is that he really was so interested in the human experience. It was deep. It was really about getting under the skin of a person and really finding out who you are and what you know.
You’ve done such a range of work on screen as well. Do your experiences with Sondheim’s characters ever feed into that work too?
Yeah, absolutely. Even though this might feel trite, every person has a story. Every single person you run into in a Starbucks or at the grocery store, everyone’s got a story. Everyone’s got their tragedy and their comedy that’s in their soul. I like to think that I approach everything that I do with the same reverence, even if it might seem lighter, because that’s what makes a person interesting: it’s all about our darkness and how it comes out. And I’ve got to say, some of the funniest people I’ve ever met in my life are the darkest people you will ever meet. Comedians, clowns… I think what makes them so funny is their darkness.
I did Kiss Me, Kate, which you might think is a more silly musical, but it’s not. She’s the way she is because of so many circumstances that led her to be that person. And I think that every character you play deserves to have the complexity and the depth that a Sondheim character has. Sometimes you have to be a little more creative and create it on your own as an actor—but every person you play deserves all of that.