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Step aside Lea Michele — there’s a new Funny Girl in town.
Smash and Last Five Years actor Jeremy Jordan, who will star in CBS’s upcoming Supergirl series, took the stage at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom on Monday night to channel his inner Barbra Streisand.
Hosted by Aasif Mandvi, the annual Miscast gala for MCC Theater, which honored Sarah Paulson and producer Fran Weissler, enlisted actors like Ben Platt, Uzo Aduba, Andrew Rannells and Laura Benanti to sing roles for which they would never be right. For the event’s finale, Jordan stepped into the determined shoes of Fanny Brice in the 1964 Broadway musical, Funny Girl.
“I just wanted to take a moment and bring it back full circle,” said Jordan before launching into a stirring rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” (Watch the video above.) “This evening is about two lovely women, Fran and Sarah. This final song is dedicated to strong and powerful women like us.”
Other performances included Rannells singing musical theater favorite “Meadowlark” from The Baker’s Wife; Aduba and Platt in a gender-bending “A Little Priest” from Sweeney Todd; and Benanti and Christopher Fitzgerald performing an updated — complete with selfies and Tinder reference — version of “Sixteen Going On Seventeen” from The Sound of Music.
One of the biggest crowd-pleasers came when Chicago director Walter Bobbie joined Jordan, Platt, Leslie Odom, Jr., Joshua Henry and Fitzgerald in an all-male take on “The Cell Block Tango.”
“I’m ready to jump in and do my rendition of ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No,'” Mandvi joked from the podium, after telling The Hollywood Reporter that he’d love to play Ado Annie. “I did Oklahoma! on Broadway so I know all the lines!”
On the carpet before the show, Orange is the New Black star Aduba shared one of the first times she auditioned for a part she wasn’t technically right for with Bernard Telsey, co-artistic director of MCC and founder of casting agency Telsey + Co.
“He brought me in for this show Coraline that they were doing, and it was the first time that someone had ever brought me in for something that was supposed to be played by this white man,” Aduba recalled. “He was like, ‘I just think you should come in and read for it. I feel like you could do something interesting with this part.’ I was so grateful for that because it just changed the way I think about parts. I was like, ‘Oh, with imagination anything is possible.'”
Both Paulson and Elizabeth Reaser shared the same dream to play Abigail Williams in The Crucible. “I’m too old for it,” Paulson said. “Those days are over. Thanks for rubbing it in!”
When Paulson took the stage to give her acceptance speech for the evening’s honor, she was poised, though admittedly nervous.
“This kind of thing makes me nauseous, like I want to hide under the table I’m so embarrassed,” the American Horror Story star confessed, admitting to avoiding Telsey’s calls and e-mails for a while regarding the honor. “I feel like I have so very far to go to be deserving of a night like this. And when I sat down to write this I thought about why did it make me so bloody nervous? And I realize it was because it means it’s happened. It’s happening. My dreams came true. I got to be an actor.”
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