Megan Mullally
“I'm kind of burned out on musicals,” says Megan Mullally, who’s rocked the Great White Way in everything from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Grease to, most recently, Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. “I just want to focus on plays.”
Hence her recent return to New York to star in a reprise of Terrence McNally’s Lips Together, Teeth Apart, costarring Patton Oswalt, Lili Taylor and David Wilson Barnes. “It’s funny; it seems it would be a little dated but it’s actually not,” says Mullally of the production in which four affluents explore their prejudices while summering on Fire Island. “It shows you the ways in which things have changed and then the ways in which they haven’t changed at all, which is chilling and sad in terms of intolerance.”
While it seems like a production that delves into AIDS and homophobia would be of no interest to an actress who won two Emmy Awards for her role on the gay-friendly sitcom Will & Grace, Mullally knows nothing should stand in the way of a good joke. “That’s the thing about comedy—you cannot be politically correct in order to be good at your job,” she says. “You always have to be pushing for the nenext thing that’s going to get a rise out of people.”
Sure to be greeted with a rise—of eyebrows—are Mullally’s plans to resurrect the life of her Will & Grace character, Karen Walker, as (drumroll, please) a musical. “Hopefully [Karen: The Musical] will be so irreverent that it won’t really count in my mind as a musical,” she says. “It’s not going to be South Pacific.” American Airlines Theatre, 227 W. 42nd St., 212-719-1300; roundabouttheatre.org
