As an actor and comedic writer, Rachel Bloom has a zest for exploring things that don’t always appear as they seem.
“I love things that are gift-wrapped in a genre that doesn’t necessarily fit the actual content,” she says. “Happy musicals that are actually quite f*cked up. Horror that’s actually quite funny.”
She’s also fascinated by absurdity and deluded characters, which makes her Broadway debut — as Toinette, a maid to a severe hypochondriac, in The Imaginary Invalid — the perfect fit for the Golden Globe-winning co-creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Bill Irwin’s brisk (and timely) adaptation of the 1673 Molière comedy explores medical quackery, family scheming, and the lengths people go to in pursuit of good health.
“For the most part, people want to be the hero of their own story,” she says. “And so they have justifications.”
Bloom also has another role in mind when The Imaginary Invalid wraps its run at the Todd Haimes Theatre on Nov. 22. “I’d love to play The Baker’s Wife [from Into the Woods], especially now that I am older and have a kid,” she says. “That’s actually the role that I identify with the most. I would love to do it. I’m tech avail!”
Below, for Bustle’s new series, Callback, Bloom goes deep on four influential plays and musicals and how they’ve shaped her career as an actor and writer.
Chicago
Her first selection is Kander and Ebb’s iconic 1975 musical Chicago about murder and fame in the 1920s. Bloom says she fell in love with the show during middle school. “The thing that resonated with me was it combined things that felt really happy, like vaudeville, with very dark things like murder and faking a pregnancy,” she says. “I think that, as a kid, growing up in a very sunny place where everyone was really happy, I also really liked happy musical theater. I had a dark side of me as well and I couldn’t marry the two.”
Bloom credits playing Roxie Hart during her senior year of high school with shaping her development as an actor. “That show is where I learned to start taking my personal emotions and putting it into a character,” she says. “The show’s so sexual and I was a virgin in high school, but I remember singing the song Funny Honey and being like, ‘OK, well what if I’m singing this about my boyfriend?’ And I hadn’t really done that before.”
Roxie’s pursuit of fame and attention also hit home. “That whole song is unabashedly, ‘Look at me, look at me, look at me, look at me!’” she says. “And look, that’s at the core of why I went into performing — and I think at the core of why most people go into performing.”
The Goat, Or Who Is Sylvia?
Her next pick is Edward Albee’s 2000 play The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?, in which a seemingly perfect family is thrown into chaos when the patriarch’s affair with a goat comes to light.
Bloom says she found the work at a formative moment in her life. “What I loved about it, because it was also simultaneously while I was learning comedy writing and comedy performing, was that you could take an almost sketch-like premise, right? Your husband’s f*cking a goat. It’s so insane. And treat it as real as possible and treat it deadly, with deadly realism,” she says. “I loved taking a premise that sounds so outlandish and just doing it the way that it would actually happen.”
It also brought her closer to a theater legend. “I did a workshop in college. It was with Kathleen Turner, and I chose a monologue from The Goat, Or Who is Sylvia?,” she says. “I got to get coached on that by her, and that was an unbelievable experience.”
Avenue Q
Her third show is Avenue Q, a 2004 cult-classic musical comedy about the harsh realities of young adulthood performed with Sesame Street-style puppets. “I started listening to the soundtrack to Avenue Q when it first came out and I was instantly obsessed,” she says. “[The year] 2004 was this legendarily amazing year for theater. Avenue Q and Wicked were the same year, and actually Avenue Q won Best Musical over Wicked [at the Tonys].”
Bloom also has dreams of a revival. “I think every woman wants to play Kate Monster,” she says. “She has unbelievable songs. I mean, ‘There’s a Fine, Fine Line’ is just a really good song about a breakup. And yeah, it happens to be sung by a puppet — but what an earnestly good breakup song.”
Into the Woods
Her final pick is Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s 1986 musical Into the Woods which imagines a set of fairy tale characters after their “happily ever afters.” In high school, Bloom played The Witch. “I’m pretty proud of the old lady voice that I was able to do,” she says. “I’m excited to be 80 and finally play the roles I want to play. There’s something that I really connect with senior citizen roles.”
Bloom says it was thrilling to get to act out The Witch’s thirst for revenge. “Because I’m a people pleaser, I don’t want to be the bad guy. I fear being seen as mean…I think that there’s a part of my rage that I still am uncomfortable expressing in earnest life because I don’t want to be seen as unstable or crazy,” she says. “Into the Woods allowed me and roles like that allow me to be angry and rageful and petty and evil in a safe space.”
