From stand-in to star, Tammy Nelson marks 25 years with ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’ in S.F.
Tammy Nelson marks 25 years, from understudy to lead, in cast of S.F.’s ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’
For “Beach Blanket Babylon” performer Tammy Nelson, who marked her 25th anniversary this month with the musical revue, being in the show is “like “Once when you you learn, drive you stick do shift.” it automatically,” Nelson says. “Now, tell me how you do it. Break it down for me. And you go, ‘I — I — you put the key in the car...’ I mean, it’s so hard!” Playing a slew of roles in the turbocharged show, from Adele to Paula Deen, from “Jewish Mother” to Queen Elizabeth II — not to mention wearing the famous San Francisco skyline hat at the show’s finale — Nelson says it can be harder to unlearn an old routine than it is to learn a new one. “There’s been a little tweaking recently,” she says, “one of which was a key change for me” to make it easier on her voice, which performs seven shows a week. It “worked well,” but after she took some time off and came back, “my head is still in the default,
and so I come out with my very first note.” Here she demonstrates, sliding up, down and all around to find her pitch as “Miss Italy,” her first character. “Not the best way that you want to start your show on. I swear to God, it took me probably until the French section” — she also plays a French streetwalker, among a parade of stock characters — “before I won (the audience) back.”
Nelson, who was raised in San Jose, had been performing in melodramas and musicals at Campbell’s Gaslighter Theater, San Jose’s Big Lil’s Cabaret and Los Gatos’ West Valley Light Opera when her sister encouraged her to audition for “Beach Blanket Babylon,” partly because of Nelson’s “comfort with an audience,” partly because of her “big voice.” (Her regular, unamplified speaking voice booms to the far reaches of Club Fugazi, the show’s longtime North Beach venue.)
She missed her first two chances to audition, but the third time around, when she was in the musical “Nunsense,” the show’s stage manager “came up to me with (The Chronicle’s) pink section. It said ‘Beach Blanket Babylon’ is holding auditions, and I damn near ripped it out of her hands.”
The audition itself, in 1993, “was the most challenging and yet different from any audition I’d done,” Nelson says. Creator Steve Silver, who died in 1995, “had a reputation of allowing people to do their thing for their auditions. It wasn’t just ballad, uptempo, can you dance . ... He offered the opportunity for people to really entertain him: ‘Show me what you got! And if it’s good enough, and you’re good enough and you get hired, it might go into the show!’ ”
For her first 16 years with the company, Nelson understudied for Val Diamond, assuming the lead when Diamond abruptly left the company in 2009. “It was mixed feelings,” says Nelson. “Not taking anything away from (Diamond), but it was something I’d always dreamt of doing: being in a fabulous show, in a fabulous city, in a featured track.”
“It was a big deal,” says producer Jo Schuman Silver. “I was scared. I didn’t know how the audience was going to react to (Nelson). But “she won them over . ... We were very lucky. It was so smooth . ... She didn’t skip a beat.”
Schuman Silver attributes that to Nelson’s inherent likability, comic presence and willingness to experiment, which means the role has expanded under Nelson to include additional characters. “She’ll try anything,” Schuman Silver says. A more recent addition is Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a role Nelson describes as “the hardest one for me to do because there’s no expression, and I’m just all about goofy faces.” Her constant Sanders note from director Kenny Mazlow is “less face.”
Mean-spiritedness has no place in “Beach Blanket Babylon.” If the “Beach Blanket” audience laps up Nelson’s caricatures, cast and crew insist that the success derives in large part from a long-standing Steve Silver directive: “We have fun with; we don’t make fun of.” An early lesson Nelson had to learn, in her role as the French streetwalker, was to “be nicer to Snow (White),” whose convoluted search for a Prince Charming drives the show’s thin plot.
One of Nelson’s most difficult performances was her first after 9/11. She felt strange about going onstage, until she decided, “It’s necessary for everybody to just forget something,” if only for the length of a show.
“I’m not a brain surgeon,” she says. She’s not going to solve world hunger or “cure cystic fibrosis,” which two of her family members have. But by performing, “I give those people who might be doing that a little bit of a break.”