Lexy Fridell gets wired

Someday, it seems clear, there will be a category of musical-theater-comedy with her name on it.

People will refer to a talented up-and-coming singer-dancer-actor-comedian and say, “She’s the next Lexy Fridell,” or, “Wow, she was almost as good as Lexy Fridell.”

But for now, of course, there’s only one Lexy Fridell, an outrageously talented performer with fast feet, an elastic face, a monster multi-octave voice that can roam through accents, personas and musical milieus like a human chameleon, and an open, vulnerable and – let’s face it – adorable presence that makes audiences bond with her like lint to a cashmere sweater.

And making her that much more precious in front of Sonoma Valley audiences (as opposed to Broadway, where she’s already a star) is the fact that she’s a bona fide local. She went to Dunbar School, she played Bambi Phingerdew in the Dunbar Melodrama (written and directed by an obscure commercial actor named Squire Fridell, formerly known as Ronald McDonald, who is also her father).

So it’s one thing when Lexy Fridell makes it to the stage of the Stephen Sondheim Theatre on Broadway and gets rave reviews as Chairry in “The Pee-Wee Herman Show” or joins the national tour of “Avenue Q.” Those shows are worlds away.

But in 2013, the first time she stood on stage in Jack London State Historic Park, for the Transcendence Theatre Company’s Fantastical Family Night of Broadway Under the Stars, and belted out “My Party Dress” from the kids musical “Henry and Mudge,” the place exploded. She blew us away, and she was ours. We could claim her.

Fridell confesses it wasn’t always easy for others to figure out exactly who and what she was. She attended the noted musical theatre program at Carnegie Mellon University, and then headed straight for New York and a two-year career as a multi-talented telemarketer, pizza kitchen person and hair salonista while agents struggled to place her. Early into the telemarketing phase, she had an identity crisis and told her boss she needed to take a walk around the block. The block was Times Square and there were all those bright lights and big names, and she knew with satisfying certainty, that’s where she belonged. Her telemarketing boss didn’t argue.

Within two years of reaching the Big Apple, Fridell was working steadily, and then she met Pee-Wee Herman and the world opened wide.

“He is a complete genius,” she says. “I was so mesmerized, he’s such an amazing actor.”

Fridell’s principal character was Herman’s big, blue, talking and singing chair. Because she couldn’t be inside the chair (which followed Herman across the stage) she had to stay out of sight, watching a monitor, to match the chair’s movements with her voice, and being ready for Herman’s flights of improvisation.

“You could never tune out with him. He came from improv and you never knew what he was going to do. He told us, ‘If I have to go to the bathroom, you’re going to have to keep it going until I’m back.’ That never happened, but you had to be ready.”

The Pee-Wee Herman Show gave Fridell a taste of adoration. “People loved him, they loved the show. It was like a rock concert. They went crazy.”

But now, with the Transcendence Theatre Company, Fridell says she has found something more.

“It’s very special and different for a theater company. I’ve never had a feeling of such positivity. There’s all this love flowing out between the audience and the actors. You’re inside those stone walls, the stars are overhead. You’re sort of able to be free.”

Fridell confesses she was a very shy child – odd, perhaps, for the daughter of two performing professionals. Squire has the distinction of being the most continuously employed television and commercial actor in SAG history, and her mom, Suzy Fridell, was a world-famous dancer and choreographer. They’re both about as shy as Robin Williams.

“I remember being so embarrassed about my dad when I was a kid. (People would ask) like what does your dad do? I’d have to say, he’s a clown.”

But shyness gave Lexy the chance to sit back and watch. “I did a lot of observing, I picked up what was funny, and at college I figured out what made me funny. I knew I wasn’t going to be a typical ingenue.”

So she developed a performing presence that started in “a sensitive and honest place” inside her. “I think the best comedy,” she says, “comes from whatever is real inside you.”

One of the real things inside Lexy Fridell was an increasingly severe overbite. “They told me, eventually all my teeth were going to fall out. They said I was going to have braces for three years. I was a voice-over actress. How was that going to work? How can I make a living wearing braces?”

Before that question could find an answer, Fridell’s agent called her for a role in Avenue Q, the smash, Tony Award-winning musical that deconstructs childhood illusions, using puppets and visible puppeteers alongside live actors.

A year after starting the show, she met someone with the same jaw problem who put her in touch with a surgeon who told her he could have her in and out of the treatment in one year, and she would only have her mouth wired shut for eight weeks.

So she asked Avenue Q if she could wear braces for three months on stage, and be out of the show for eight weeks. “It was the most amazing thing. They let me do it.”

After the surgery, Fridell had to learn to talk and sing all over again, with rubber bands in her teeth.

In time, that experience became a gift.

“Magically, Brad (Surosky, Transcendence co-executive director) called me and said they’d love to do a one-woman show,” explains Fridell. “I’ve wanted to do a one-woman show since college, but I really didn’t know what it was about.”

Then she thought about the braces, the drooling and the “very expensive blender” she bought to make liquid lunches while her mouth was wired, and started writing, threw in some music, then partnered with musical director Matt Moisey and associate director Robert Petrarca to fine tune the show.

The result, “Brace Yourself: Tales of Braces, Broadway, Dating and Drool,” will debut as the first Transcendence Artist Series production, at Chateau St. Jean Winery in Kenwood, Saturday and Sunday night.

Fridell expects the show will grow and evolve as she exposes it to more and more audiences, hopefully in New York, L.A. and elsewhere.

For now, though, “What better place to try it out than in front of my home audience, and my parents. I feel blessed,” says Lexy Fridell. “It’s beyond my wildest dreams.”

The two weekend shows of “Brace Yourself” may be sold out, but visit TTCsonoma.org to be sure. If you can beg, buy, borrow or steal a ticket, do it.