'Bun'-derful new world
Foster shifts spotlights, from broadway to cable
WHEN THEY told Sutton Foster on the set of ABC Family's “Bunheads” that the cast gets weekends off, she inadvertently channeled Maggie Smith.
“I said, ‘ A Saturday? What’s this? What is this foreign thing?’ But it turned out to be kind of nice.”
Foster can be forgiven here for echoing Smith’s famous query on ‘Downton Abbey’: “What is a week-end?”
Foster has spent the last two decades mostly in theater, and rather successfully. Her armload of awards includes two Tonys, the most recent in 2011 for playing Reno Sweeney in “Anything Goes.” In theater, everyone works weekends. “So in some ways it’s been a totally different world” to do series television, she says. “It’s felt like three months of schooling on how to make a TV show. I even watch television differently now, because I see how it’s done.”
The 37-year-old Foster has always been a TV fan, though, and one of her faves is “Gilmore Girls,” which is what led her to “Bunheads,” which finishes its first season Monday night at 8.
“I wasn’t really looking to do series television,” says Foster. “But I was chatting with my agent about my dream writers, and I brought up Amy Sherman-Palladino.”
Sherman-Palladino wrote “Gilmore Girls’ and at the time, unbe knownst to Foster, was drafting “Bunheads,” the story of thirtysomething dancer Michelle Sims, who finds herself in a weird small town with her mother-inlaw, Fanny (Kelly Bishop).
Fanny is a dancer, too, and now runs a studio whose students prominently include four teenage ballerinas — the bunheads, the other focal point of the show.
“So Amy and I had a meeting,” says Foster, “at which I went all geeky fan-girl on her. But I got the part.” It turned out to be all she wished for. “The writing is so good,” she says, “it’s almost a character of its own.”
But she and her co-stars also must deliver that witty, fast-paced dialogue, one of whose charms is that it serves the characters rather than sitcom joke setups.
Michelle uses humor as “a mask,” Foster suggests, and it makes her intriguing to play. “I have no idea what’s going to happen to her,” she says. “It’s like life. I have no idea where I will be in three years.”
One place she’d like to be is still in “Bunheads,” which ABC Family just announced will return with new episodes this winter.
Meanwhile, she’s preparing for a latefall concert tour and staying in dance shape. “I’ve started taking ballet classes again, in case they want me to do a solo.”
And theater? Yes, there will be some of that, “though at the moment there’s nothing concrete.”
Except a few more Saturdays off.