Sherie Rene Scott

The story of her life


Sherie Rene Scott is half Mennonite—"the lower half," she says. How a Kansas girl whose religion discourages sex and self-expression (unless they serve a higher purpose) became the luscious, trumpet-voiced star of Broadway musicals such as Aida, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and The Little Mermaid is the story of Everyday Rapture, a new play interspersed with songs that opens this month at off Broadway's Second Stage.

Scott describes Everyday Rapture as "a one-woman show with four people"—and that's just the start of the metafictional hijinks she and cowriter Dick Scanlan have in store. ("It's like if Philip Roth could sing," Scott says. "Imagine how much further he could go!") As in a Roth novel, a character named Sherie Rene Scott relates autobiographical anecdotes, except that many are made up. Performing for Elizabeth Taylor in a mental hospital, befriending a member of the hate-mongering Fred Phelps clan, falling in love with a street magician who makes her virginity disappear, being spurned by a fanboy who imitates her on YouTube— Scott won't reveal which of these hilarious, heart-stopping vignettes really happened. "Only some are factual," she explains. "But all are true."

The character called "Sherie" is somewhere in between. She is "wronger" than the real Sherie: needy, narcissistic, and almost too eager to perform, whereas Scott says she's uncomfortable singing without a character she can hide behind and a story that, yes, "serves a higher purpose." Here the higher purpose is an exploration of the meaning of faith in a world that seems to stymie it. "Most people, when they become parents"—Scott and her husband, the record producer Kurt Deutsch, have a five-year-old boy—"get closer to God in gratitude for their luck. But instead I started wondering what kind of God doles out his grace to only a few. The show is my attempt to find a replacement for religious feeling in art."

Thus justified, Scott blows the house down. But as riveting as the result is, Everyday Rapture depends less on spirituality than on a switcheroo even the magician boyfriend couldn't have pulled off: It finesses the question of God by substituting a goddess.

This Is A Developing Story

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