“I was a rude, ugly, boring child,” Jackie Hoffman says on stage, “and if you think I’m self-loathing now, you’re lucky you didn’t see the one woman show I did when I was five!”
After singing and dancing her way through such Broadway hits as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Adams Family, Hairspray, On the Town, and Xanadu, and stealing more scenes in such television roles as Curb Your Enthusiasm, Difficult People, and 30 Rock, and films as Kissing Jessica Stein, Mo’ Money, Garden State, Down, Queer Duck: The Movie, Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde, and A Dirty Shame, Hoffman will bring her one woman show, From Broadway to Bay Street, on Monday, July 2.
Nominated for an Emmy as Mamacita in Feud, Hoffman grabbed headlines as the sorest loser ever on the Awards telecast, punching the air and mouthing “damnit” when Laura Dern’s name — not hers — was announced. She followed that performance by tweeting “Laura Dern had famous parents. Forgive me for being from real people #elitism #Emmys2017;” then, “I hear that Laura Dern runs a child porn ring #soreloser Emmys2017,” and “I hear that Laura Dern looted art from Nazi victims,” and finally, “I hear the media actually taking my reaction seriously? Are you kidding me?”
In her Bay Street show, a version of her laugh-til-you-cry Joe’s Pub performances that often turn into CDs, she says, “there are two tasty bits” reading from what she calls her Memoircita diary and “a beautifully almost orchestrated whole piece about the Emmys. It’s really stunning and a lot of fun. I hope people care and if they don’t, I’ll make ’em care!”
Her relationship to the Hamptons? “It’s not as deep as I’d like,” she confesses. “Right now, I’m more of the Help in the Hamptons.” Five years ago, when she starred in the Bay Street production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, she said “trash like us weren’t allowed on a lot of the beaches” … that is without a parking sticker.
She’ll have no time for the beach this trip. She’s rehearsing to play Yente in Yiddish, in the National Yiddish Theatre Folksbiene’s new Yiddish-language Fiddler on the Roof, directed by Joel Grey, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage beginning July 4. It’s a good fit: Hoffman’s Jewish heritage is often front and center in her routines. “My father came from German Jews who were barely Jewish,” says Hoffman, “and my mother came from a very Jewish home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. So, she was the Yiddish speaker. I never really bothered to learn the language and it’s kicking me in the ass now.” Yente in Yiddish may not be the role Hoffman was born to play, “but it’s the role my mother bore me to play.”
Bay Street Theater is located at 1 Bay Street in Sag Harbor. For more information or tickets, visit www.baystreet.org.