(Photo courtesy of Eileen T’Kaye)

Actress Eileen T’Kaye Comes Home

The Funny Girl tour lands her onstage at the Ahmanson Theatre

By Steven Leigh Morris

“I’m a native” is how Eileen T’Kaye describes her attachment to Los Angeles. She also quips that to get onstage at L.A.’s palatial, chandelier-lobbied 2,000-seat Ahmanson Theatre, you have to come through New York. (The Ahmanson is one of two grand theater palace venues in Los Angeles, the other being the Pantages Theatre.) She’s now performing on the Ahmanson’s stage — having indeed come through New York.

T’Kaye has been a fixture on local stages for decades, appearing at the Geffen Playhouse, Disney Hall, International City Theatre in Long Beach, La Mirada Theatre, as well as the Coachella Valley Rep and Phoenix Playhouse. She is also the Founding Producing Director of Boston Court Pasadena.

She’s currently playing Mrs. Strakosh (and understudying Mrs. Brice) in the Funny Girl touring production currently in residence at the Ahmanson Theatre.

So how did she get to this stage?

Last April, T’Kaye’s agent notified her that the tour’s producers in New York wanted her to submit an audition “tape” for the role of Mrs. Brice (lead character Fanny Brice’s mother). Digital auditions are not her favorite way of presenting herself, but she did it: recording it, submitting it, and then forgetting about it.

Two months later, “They said they wanted me to come to New York for a ‘final callback,'” she explains, expressing surprise that this was to be a “final callback.” Her experience in the past was that once you’re called in for a New York stage casting, there are a series of auditions, theater’s version of musical chairs.

When she got to New York, they wanted her to read for Mrs. Strakosh instead of Mrs. Brice. Perplexed, she asked if she was still being considered for Mrs. Brice. They told her she was, that they were exploring options. (Melissa Manchester was ultimately cast as Mrs Brice).

One week later, they offered the her role of Mrs. Strakosh, and also to be the understudy for Mrs. Brice. It was to be a one-year commitment, starting in August for rehearsals on 42nd Street in New York.

With a devoted husband and aging parent living in their Pasadena home, a year of touring was something she needed to mull over. As so many actors know, the touring life is not all glamor and glitz — living out of a suitcase in a hotel with one day off a week, frequently spent traveling to the next city. Yet her husband, David Bischoff, felt it was the kind of opportunity that doesn’t come every day. “Absolutely go for it and we’ll figure it out,” T’Kaye says he told her.

“I’m at a point in my life when I could actually leave. It was an exciting opportunity.”

They put her up in NYC to rehearse. She was also given a per diem on top of a salary.

Though currently home, she’s still on tour: “I feel very taken care of,” she reports. “I’ve heard horrors stories about tours, and I’ve heard wonderful things about tours, and I’m in the ‘wonderful’ camp.”

She says that the cast was not just New Yorkers. It also included people from Arizona and Chicago. The show’s star, Katerina McCrimmon, hails from Florida. Though rehearsing in New York, the tour started in Providence, Rhode Island before rolling through Detroit, Baltimore, Grand Rapids, Durham, Naples and Fort Lauderdale in Florida, Durham, St. Louis. “There’s more,” she adds.

The original production opened in London before transferring to Broadway, which gave rise to the touring production. All through the process, “The creatives were still working on the show, as they learned things along the way,” she explains.

Nobody told her, or the other actors, to do it the way other people did it. “My Mrs. Brice is very different from Melissa Manchester’s Mrs. Brice .  . Instead of having you impersonate somebody, they encourage you to make it your own.”

By the time she arrived in New York, the principal actors, the leads, had been working a week before.

“When we had our first read-through, a week after the principals started, Katerina McCrimmon [cast as lead Fanny Brice] sang at the table, we were like, we were crying, we were getting chills, she got several standing ovations at the table. What we realized was, we were watching this ‘newcomer’ — she’s very young — we were watching somebody becoming a star, the immense talent this person has. We’re all just staring at her thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’ve just discovered this talent,’ and this is also the story [of Funny Girl]. It’s her story and we’re supporting that story as she looks back on her life.”

Six months into the tour, T’Kaye found herself back home, onstage at the Ahmanson Theatre. Her husband, David, has flown out to see her in Baltimore, where she was performing Mrs. Brice. “It wasn’t until L.A. that he actually saw me do Mrs. Strakosh.”

“Did he give you a review?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied, before adding, after a pause, with her lips curling up,  “It was excellent.”

“What’s it like to come home?” I asked.

“I’m a native. It’s been my home forever. It’s really exciting. I’ve never played the Ahmanson. We used to joke that, because it’s a touring place, you don’t get the opportunity to play there. So it’s particularly fun to come home and play at the Ahmanson. The joy of LA, for me, is that you don’t go to a hotel, you get to come home. I live 20 minutes from the theater when the freeways aren’t jammed.”

Yet being home is a bit of a mirage. The tour has commenced its West Coast leg, and still has six months to go. San Francisco comes after L.A., and then Costa Mesa, and back to the East Coast: Connecticut, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Atlanta. . .

Her contract is up in August, when they’ll be booking the next leg, another one-year commitment. At this point, T’Kaye is weighing options, “if they choose me, and if I choose to.”

After all, to be trained in the theater, for a life in the theater, with its gaps of unemployment, with its barbs of perennial rejection, to then be paid well to act and sing and dance, for a year at a time, in a Broadway tour: How often does that come along?

FUNNY GIRL | A musical that tells the story of the indomitable Fanny Brice, a girl from the Lower East Side who dreamed of a life on the stage. Ahmanson Theatre, downtown LA. Tues.-Sat., 8 pm, Sat., 2 pm, Sun., 1 pm & 6:30 pm; thru April 28. https://www.centertheatregroup.org/tickets/ahmanson-theatre/2023-24/funny-girl/

Funny Girl will also be at Segerstrom Center for the Arts in Costa Mesa. It will play there from May 28-June 9.