This Evil Stepmother Has Perfect Comedic Timing

You don’t need to visit a faraway kingdom to see that, in “Once Upon a One More Time,” Jennifer Simard is demonstrating what her devoted following of fans have long known: Her comedic performances sear themselves into the brain, often becoming a show’s selling point.

Take, for example, her choice in the first act of this jukebox musical with a fairy tale flavor set to Britney Spears’s songs: Playing Cinderella’s Stepmother, the actress, who has been sitting on the floor in a gargantuan gown, is dressing down her less-than-chic adoptee. Then, midsentence, she back rolls into a standing position — in heels.

The move brings the house down, but doesn’t stop the show. Rather, it keeps it all going. As natural as it is indescribably comical, the action makes plain that Simard, 53, is more invested in continuing the larger story.

“I had to get up, and it occurred to me that it’s a great juxtaposition between a dress that makes me look like a human feather duster, and ‘Why not?’” she said. “I’m of the school that says you have to take a bunch of spaghetti and throw it at the wall and see what sticks.”

The performance is full of Simardisms: big moments of physical comedy and high-flying vocal acrobatics sprinkled shrewdly with a deadpan, almost Mid-Atlantic affect. “She sounds like she’s been drinking cocktails and smoking cigarettes for centuries,” said Mari Madrid, who directed and choreographed the show with her husband, Keone.

“The way she developed that moment and turned it into physical comedy was all Jenn,” Madrid said. “When you have someone like that, you have to lean into their ideas.”

But the actor also finds value in seeing “how small you can make something and achieve a big result.” During a recent interview at the Moxy hotel in Times Square (selected by Simard because her character “has moxie”), she mentioned a line in which, frustrated with her daughters, her character drolly threatens to boil them.

“As written, it’s all in capital letters with a big exclamation point, and that makes sense when you’re typing to convey that she’s angry,” she said. “However, the way to successfully play it is to undercut it as much as possible, because the containment of the rage is funnier than the feeling itself. In the best comedy, it’s what the character is not getting — what they are frustrated about — that’s funniest.”

The same could be said of Simard’s career. She has amassed a loyal following as a sort of “if you know, you know” insider legend. And, as she tells it, she realized her talents while growing up in Litchfield, N.H.

Before a visit to a theater in Manchester, N.H., drew her to the stage, she said she idolized “funny, funny women” on TV. These included Madeline Kahn, Anne Bancroft, Bernadette Peters and Barbara Barrie, whose performance in a recording of “Barefoot in the Park” from the early 1980s she called “a lesson in comedic timing.” Simard eventually appeared onstage with Peters in “Hello, Dolly!,” after Peters replaced Bette Midler during that musical’s 2016 revival, and, as Barrie had years before, played Sarah in the recent revival of the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical “Company.”

“I wasn’t the class clown — I was quite a good girl — but I knew from a very early age that I had that inside of me,” she said. “It’s like Jeanine Tesori said about ‘Fun Home’” in her acceptance speech at the Tony Awards. “Little girls need to see things to believe it’s possible. Having that exposure was so important to why I’m here.”

A stint studying musical theater at the Boston Conservatory at Berklee ended after one semester, when Simard booked a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in New Hampshire and, later, a role in “Nunsense” — which began her recurring habit of onstage habits.

Armed with improv training in Boston, she moved to New York in 1992, after she was cast in “Forbidden Broadway ’93.” She soon met Seth Rudetsky, who became her vocal coach and later cast her in “Disaster!,” his 2013 Off Broadway musical.

In the intervening 20 years, Simard opened in the long-running “I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change,” which earned her the first of four Drama Desk Award nominations, and she made her Broadway debut as a replacement in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” followed by small roles in “Shrek the Musical” and “Sister Act.”

“She hit it out of the ballpark when she moved here,” Rudetsky said during a phone call, “and everyone was obsessed with her, but then she was just sort of taking jobs so she could keep working, not showing people what she could do. There are very few roles where someone like her can show everything she can do, and it becomes almost a hindrance.”

Rudetsky’s spoof of 1970s disaster films got her closer to that kind of role. As Sister Mary Downy, a gambling-addicted nun, Simard “brought down the house,” he said.

When “Disaster!” briefly transferred to Broadway in 2016, her performance — especially her first-act rendition of “Never Can Say Goodbye” — earned the production’s sole Tony nomination and inspired an (ultimately unsuccessful) grass-roots social media campaign, #PutSimardOn, to feature her in that year’s ceremony.

“Vocally she got to do the thing she does now during ‘Toxic,’ which is underplay first, then shock the audience at the end,” Rudetsky said. (In her review for The New York Times, Elisabeth Vincentelli wrote that it’s “as if Moira Rose from ‘Schitt’s Creek’ and Norma Desmond had spawned a villainess crooning a slowed-down ‘Toxic.’”)

Simard gets only two songs from Spears’s catalog in “Once Upon a One More Time”: her campy entrance to “Work Bitch” and “Toxic,” an 11 o’clock number she twists into a seat-clenching wail she calls her “Robert Plant-Steven Tyler moment.”

“The music is quite mercurial,” she said, “and we’ve come up with a homage that conveys what that section of the show needs. I do what I can to make it vocally exciting.”

She flexed a similar shrieking melodic ability as Ernestina in “Hello, Dolly!” — hers is the earsplitting high C on that cast album’s “Put on Your Sunday Clothes.”

Shortly after “Dolly!,” Tina Fey, who saw her in “Disaster!,” cast her as a replacement in “Mean Girls,” playing, among others, the teacher role that Fey played in the film.

Then came the gender-swapped revival of “Company,” in which Simard played the fitness addict Sarah. Previews began in March 2020, but the industry shutdown delayed its opening until December 2021 and Covid outbreaks among the cast plagued its run.

“Whew, I thought we’d all come back and there’d be a ribbon-cutting ceremony,” she joked, “but it seemed like we never really got out of the red alert of it all, and that’s a very intense place.”

At one point, Patti LuPone, who played the cynical, hard-drinking Joanne, came down with Covid and, with 45 minutes notice, Simard was tapped to fill in for what would be 11 performances.

“I didn’t see any of it, but I had tears rolling down my eyes because she sounded amazing,” Christopher Sieber, her scene partner in the production, recalled during a video call. “It’s Jennifer, so she’d prepared like crazy, but taking that — subbing for Patti LuPone and singing “The Ladies Who Lunch” — is a daunting task.”

Being partnered with Sieber, her longtime friend, helped. The two played a couple struggling to adhere to their diets, and one bit had her doing tricep dips.

“It’s an interesting scene because there are no jokes,” Sieber said. “It’s all behavioral, observational kind of humor, and Jennifer found the funny in things like that. She knows where a laugh should be, and breaks down every little thing, finding the trail that will get you to that moment.

“She is a scientist,” he added. “There wasn’t a syllable we didn’t discuss.”

LuPone would win that season’s best featured actress Tony, with Simard earning her second Tony nomination in that same category. But, Stepmother scene-stealing aside, Simard has her sights on another possible star turn. Shortly before being cast in “Once Upon a One More Time,” she and Sieber participated in an industry reading of “Death Becomes Her,” a musical adaptation of the 1992 film. She read the part played by Goldie Hawn.

“You know when it’s a winner, and it’s a winner,” she said, hinting at a future life for the prospective show.

Citing her “always correct” intuition, calling back to her now flourishing career, and unintentionally echoing her own comedic technique, she added: “You know, there’s no substitute for time.”