I’m offering some lighter “play typer” content this weekend, as I move some of my favorite podcast interviews to the Substack app. You can listen above without venturing to Spotify, iTunes, or the rest.
Here’s my chat with the lovely Leah Sprecher, aka Broadway Barbara. It’s timely because I just got my ticket for Barbara’s Valentine’s Day livestream, featuring specialty cocktails and “thigh-chafing dance moves.”
Transcript excerpt from our interview:
SER: What gave birth to Broadway Barbara?
LEAH SPRECHER: Well, it was at the Sunday Company at the Groundlings. For people who don't know what that is, it’s a sketch comedy school and performance ground that a lot of people out of Saturday Night Live got scouted [from] be on the show.
And I took class there and then I got invited to be a part of the Sunday Company … and you you write new sketches every week and the director puts new sketches in the show and you’re performing every single week for essentially, I was there for a year.
So a year of my life, I was writing and performing sketches. And I wrote Barbara as part of that … Initially she was just a five minute sketch where the character Barbara was auditioning to be the ingenue in 42nd Street. She was trying to be the best, trying to prove that she could still be Peggy Sawyer because she had played it when she was young.
And the initial sketch was just, yeah, her auditioning, her aggressively tap dancing, trying to show that she still has what it takes. And that was the most successful sketch I’d ever done at the Groundlings … People loved it so much because it was physically funny and the character was really funny.
Years later, I finally decided I wanted to make it a full show … Prior to the pandemic, it was a live show first before I got on social media, so I decided to expand it.
I had a friend who wanted to do her own solo show. And I was like, all right, we can share the night. I’ll do half the night. You could do half the night. We’ll invite our friends. It’ll be low pressure.
So that was in 2018.
I did the first half-hour iteration of the show, and then I actually met my now husband at that time and he collaborates. He collaborated on the show with me at that time, and then we got married and then the pandemic happened.
During the pandemic, we wrote and shot the sketches … We started to put the character on social media just because we had ample time to do so.
That’s when I got this online following, and when things opened up, now this online following is coming to the live show. So it worked really nicely.
Let's Cozy Up With Leah Sprecher (AKA Broadway Barbara)