Preparing for Kander & Ebb Tribute Show, Karen Mason Says She's 'Pretty F***ng Lucky'

EDGE: Let's go back to the beginning. Did you always want to be in music and theater?

Karen Mason: My mother was a pianist and she loved music, so we always had it around the house. I don't know if I always aspired to it. I always loved it, but it wasn't until I was a bit older that I started to envision that that's where I wanted to be.

I went to an all-girls Catholic high school and doing the musicals was a way to meet boys. I needed a prom date. This was my big motivation. I got cast in the show, didn't get a date. But as soon as I was on that stage, I found I was very much at home, and I liked it. I was kind of a nerd; today it means something not quite so horrible as when I was growing up. I was not popular. I was fat, skinny, fat, skinny. I had a horrible self-image. To do something where I thought I was appreciated just for what I was doing was kind of nice. And so I felt very at home, very appreciated on the stage.

EDGE: You have an amazing voice. Didn't somebody say, 'Wow what a voice' at some point?

Karen Mason: When I was growing up my sisters and I were always singing, doing harmony, doing shows and things for our parents. We were young girls who were crazy theatrical and just loved music. It can be annoying, but we continued forth. I found out later in life both my sisters have beautiful voices. I never really thought about it much back then.

EDGE: And yet you went to college for music.

Karen Mason: I started out with great passion for college, but I didn't go to a school that had a great musical theater department and that's what I really wanted to do. The University of Illinois Chicago was, at the time, very divided between drama and music, and the music was opera. They did musicals, and I did every one of them, but it was really a very drama-driven department. So I did a lot of community theater where I could kind of satisfy my musical theatre desire.

At some point I decided I wanted to get close to the people who were getting paid for doing what I was doing for free. I was living in a suburb of Chicago at the time and knew I needed to get into the city.

I auditioned for a job as a singing waitress at a restaurant in Chicago called Lawrence of Oregano. I met a gentleman there who changed my life. His name was Brian Lasser. He was the music director there. When he heard me sing he said he felt he had found his Judy Garland.

EDGE: That's quite a compliment.

Karen Mason: We worked together for 16 years. We made our way through Chicago working the gay clubs and concerts, then we finally decided to move to New York. He found out he had AIDS in 1989 or '90, and passed away in '92. I had 16 beautiful years with a man who changed my life. At that point I knew exactly where I should be. Of course when he died, it was like having the rug taken out from underneath me. I never envisioned my life without him at the piano so it was a big change.

But, you know, you move on however you do, and I was lucky to find my new musical director, Christopher Denny, and my director, Barry Kleinbort. We've been working together ever since '94.

EDGE: Let's talk about Kander and Ebb.

Karen Mason: Barry suggested that we do a single songwriter show of the music of John Kander and Fred Ebb because of my relationship with them. And I thought it was a great idea. There's an awful lot of great music and I do have a long relationship with them, so why not?

EDGE: When did your relationship with them begin?

Karen Mason: It started when I got cast in "And the World Goes 'Round." They've been very good to me over the years. I'm not saying we had the Liza Minnelli or Chita Rivera kind of relationship, but they knew me and I certainly knew them. John asked me to do the demo for "The Visit" when they were still writing it. I sang at Carnegie Hall when they were being honored. And I sang "All That Jazz," come to think of it.

EDGE: One of their big ones.

Karen Mason: It was Chris and Barry's arrangement of it. John actually called Chris the next day and said he loved the arrangement and wished he had thought of it.

EDGE: That's pretty high praise.

Karen Mason: John Kander is one of the kindest people. And the two of them have been very good to me.

EDGE: How do you pick songs for a Kander and Ebb album?

Karen Mason: It's like a five-year-old choosing candy in a candy store. The hard thing about Kander and Ebb is they write great eleven o'clock numbers. How many can you do in one album? So we had to be judicious in that. We knew we had to do "New York, New York" and give it something fresh. Chris and Barry put it together with a song called "All I Need is One Good Break" from "Flora the Red Menace," and it's become the story of my coming to New York to pursue my dreams. It's pretty fabulous. It's why people come here.

Watch Karen Mason sing "Colored Lights" from Kander and Ebb's "The Rink."

EDGE: What can we expect in the upcoming show?

Karen Mason: Certainly we'll do some stuff from the CD. Sorry, my husband keeps correcting me, "It's not a CD anymore, Karen, it's an album." [Laughs] It's from the album. But we'll also give you a sampling of other things a bit more personal, some stuff about my Broadway career and things that have touched me over the years. Something from "Mamma Mia!," a little bit from "Wonderland."

EDGE: You have to have a few big crowd pleasers.

Karen Mason: We're opening with "All That Jazz." I think we'll be fine. You'll definitely know it's a Kander and Ebb show.

EDGE: You were the original Tanya in the Broadway production of "Mamma Mia!" Did you have any idea how big it was going to be?

Karen Mason: They did things a little backwards, so Broadway was not the first production. Before it came to Broadway they had done it and perfected it in London, where it had been running for a long time, and also in Toronto. I had auditioned for the Toronto company, and they did a national tour from that company. Louise Pitra was in that national tour, and they brought her to New York for Broadway.

Judy [Kaye] and I auditioned for the Broadway company, but by that time we knew it was a big old behemoth. We knew what it was going to be. It was not a surprise. What was a surprise is that 9/11 happened as we were rehearsing. That colored a lot of what went on. We were doing a jukebox musical, but weren't really quite sure how it was going to be received.

EDGE: It must've been difficult to do during a big, fabulous, fun musical during one of the darkest times in history.

Karen Mason: When [Mayor] Giuliani pushed for the theater to reopen we were not the first, but one of the first to reopen. On our opening preview, Judy Kaye and I were dressed in spandex, wondering how the world was going to receive us.

I have to say that it was a way to escape the intensity for just a couple of hours. It was a gift to the people in the house, and a real gift to us, as well. We were all living through this, and here we had two hours of just kind of being able to be silly, tell a story, sing music, and, what we all wanted to do, escape.

EDGE: That must've been amazing.

Karen Mason: I will never forget the energy that came at that stage on the first night. We had a few people dancing in the aisles when we started the mega mix at the end of the show. Then we came out in our freaking spandex and silver platform boots and ran down the stage to "Mamma Mia." This incredible energy just came at us, and it was like nothing I'd ever experienced. Louise had experienced it, but I have a feeling the intensity in New York was a bit more because people were all coming from a crisis situation. It came from the gut. It was a very unique, very beautiful situation. For that alone, I'm very lucky that I was a part of that.

EDGE: If you can have a redo on any one thing in your career, what would that be?

Karen Mason: I don't know if I'd have a redo on anything. I've made mistakes along the way, but I'm not sure if I would want to redo because I wouldn't know what the outcome would be. I don't think there's something that I really regret. Nah, I kind of like my career. I wish there was more of it, but I kind of like it.

EDGE: You seem very satisfied and very grateful.

Karen Mason: Today I am. I think the only thing I ever complain about is that I would love to have more opportunities. I think we all kind of feel that way. But, as my husband said, "I'm not sure there are enough hours in the day for all those opportunities."

I like the people I work with. I like the people I sing to, I like my friends. I have a roof over my head. I have a cute husband who's also probably some of the best ears in the business for me, and he's on the journey with me. We can pay our bills and we get to go on trips every once in a while, and we're still here to enjoy it.

I think turning 70 was a big eye opener for me. I've heard from people in my age bracket that there's one birthday you look at as a turning point. I think for me, 70 was it. When I told Paul this, he said I sounded depressed. But it's not depressing to me. It's enlivening that I have this number of years potentially left. And I get to enjoy them, as opposed to always feeling like you haven't done enough. You know, I'm not big enough, I'm not a star enough, I'm not skinny enough, I'm not blonde enough. I've spent my life thinking I was not enough. When I turned 70, I gave myself permission to appreciate what I had. It was a nice turning point for me. Oh, believe me, I still complain, but I snap out of it a little bit faster, and I do feel myself, lucky and blessed.

For right now, we have our health. We have a roof over our heads, and, yeah, I'm pretty fucking lucky.

For tickets and information please visit KarenMason.com.