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Donna Lynne Champlin as Paula and Steele Stebbins as Tommy  in
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TV preview: CMU/CLO alum Donna Lynne Champlin gets ‘Crazy’ in new comedy

Patrick Wymore/The CW

TV preview: CMU/CLO alum Donna Lynne Champlin gets ‘Crazy’ in new comedy

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. – Musicals were mostly absent from TV for the last quarter of the 20th century, but that’s changed in the new millennium with occasional specials – NBC presents “The Wiz LIVE!” in December; Fox has “Grease: Live” in January – and weekly series, from “Glee” and “Smash” to “Galavant,” and now there’s The CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (8 tonight, WPCW), a one-hour comedy with musical numbers.

‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’

When: 8 tonight, The CW.

Starring: Rachel Bloom, Donna Lynne Champlin.

“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” follows Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) as she quits her New York lawyer job to follow an ex-boyfriend, Josh Chan (Vincent Rodriguez III), to his hometown of West Covina, Calif., where she lands a new job. A paralegal at her new law firm, Paula, is played by 1993 Carnegie Mellon University grad Donna Lynne Champlin, a veteran of “Billy Elliot” on Broadway and multiple shows at Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, including 2013’s production of Kopit and Yeston’s “Phantom of the Opera,” where she played La Carlotta.

“What haven’t I done at the CLO?” she said in an August interview, citing appearances in CLO productions of “Mame” (2008) and “The Full Monty” (2007).  She started as a member of the CLO ensemble between her first and second years at CMU. “I was a freshman and [Pittsburgh native, CMU Class of ’91 grad and recent Tony winner] Billy Porter happened to walk by me and said, ‘Are you going to the CLO auditions?’ I didn’t know anything about it and he said, ‘Grab your dance bag, we’re going,’ and thanks to Billy Porter I went through the whole audition routine and got it, and from that I got my Equity card.”

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For two years while in college she was roommates with actress Renee Elise Goldsberry, who stars in “Hamilton” on Broadway and is a recurring player on CBS’s “The Good Wife” as Geneva Pine. Ms. Champlin recalls moving off-campus to an apartment on Maryland Avenue in Shadyside in large part due to CMU’s bagpipers.

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“God bless those bagpipers but they practiced right outside my dorm building at, like, 6 in the morning every day,” she said, laughing.

Ms. Champlin remembers working with Rob Ashford, Rob Marshall and Kathleen Marshall in those early years, making connections that would prove useful after graduation.

“I had booked six months of work following graduation because of those contacts, so the day after graduation I went to New York and started to work,” said Ms. Champlin, a four-time national tap dance champion while in high school.

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Ms. Champlin never had aspirations beyond theater but after moving to a new talent agency four years ago she landed guest roles on series filmed in New York (two episodes of “Law & Order: SVU,” “one as a cop, one as a psycho;” one episode of “The Good Wife” as “a crazy, horrible parent”).

 

“I did mostly day player stuff and was very happy to and [‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’] was my very first pilot audition and it’s crazy that not only did they cast me but it got picked up,” she said. “It’s like a needle in a haystack.”

That almost didn’t happen. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” created by Ms. Bloom and showrunner Aline Brosh McKenna (“The Devil Wears Prada”), was originally developed as a half-hour comedy for Showtime. The premium cable channel passed on it.

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“I think the show was a little too bubbly for them,” Ms. McKenna said after an August CW press conference. “It might have read darker on the page than it is and that’s partly because Rachel is a beam of sunshine.”

After Showtime passed, producers looked for a new network to air the series.

“Busted pilots looking for a home is like one of the stages of grief,” Ms. McKenna said. “‘We’re gonna send it to Amazon,’ you hear that 10 times a day in every [Los Angeles] Starbucks. I had been doing this a while and I thought, well, we’ll take a shot but Rachel was much more hopeful because she’s hasn’t been in the business as long.”

Ms. McKenna was a fan of The CW’s “Jane the Virgin” and suggested it might pair well with “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”

“I called the folks at our studio and said, why don’t we try there?” she said. “It’s very different but in some funny way it’s spiritual kin. They’re doing things in our space in terms of being genre-busting, female, fizzy things. It just so happened we were at the right place at the right time.”

Trim some profanity and “sex stuff,” Ms. McKenna said, add in another 10 minutes to better define some of the secondary characters, and the “Crazy” episode that airs tonight on The CW is largely the same as the pilot made for Showtime.

Each “Crazy” episode will have two or three musical numbers, from different music genres, that take place in Rebecca’s imagination.

“When we thought of the title ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,’ we were immediately thinking of it from the perspective of the crazy person,” Ms. Bloom said during a CW press conference. “We were never labeling her as an other. We were always thinking about, everyone feels crazy when they are in love at some point. …

“When you are truly obsessed and in love with someone in a way that you are stalking them, you are not going from being super happy about yourself to that. Chances are there is some level of depression or anxiety,” she said. “And as someone who has gone through and struggled with depression and anxiety, it's very important to me that we make it clear that … this is someone who is struggling with issues, because someone who is a crazy ex is going to be struggling with issues.”

Ms. McKenna said the series ultimately will not be about Rebecca chasing a boy but about her building a new life.

“Think of it as a fish-out-of-water show,” she said. “She’s in this new place and going there on this pursuit, but once she gets there she meets new people, she’s working at a new law firm.”

The relationship between Rebecca and Paula, Ms. Champlin’s character, will eventually turn into the central relationship in the series.

“What [Rebecca] needs the most is a mom. And she does find a maternal figure, but the maternal figure is crazier than she is,” Ms. McKenna said. “So that's kind of the magic of that relationship. [Paula is] very comforting to her as she spurs her on to do even crazier things than she might do on her own.”

Although Paula comes across as an antagonist initially, that changes by the end of tonight’s premiere.

“You think I’m gonna give [Rebecca] the name of a good psychiatrist, but then it goes another way,” Ms. Champlin said. “But that’s the magic of the show: Don’t try to figure out where it’s going but enjoy those moments because things do turn on a dime. That’s one of the reasons to watch, I think.”

TV writer Rob Owen: rowen@post-gazette.com or 412-263-2582. Read the Tuned In Journal blog at post-gazette.com/tv. Follow RobOwenTV on Twitter or Facebook.

First Published: October 12, 2015, 4:00 a.m.

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Donna Lynne Champlin as Paula and Steele Stebbins as Tommy in "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend."  (Patrick Wymore/The CW)
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