Marla Mindelle Is Making Off-Broadway Fun Again

Imagine you wake up and are stuck in an old-timey musical with outdated plot points, racist undertones, and no exit. Marla Mindelle lives this reality every night in her latest show, The Big Gay Jamboree, in which her character, Stacey, has to find her way out of a 1940s off-Broadway musical. To some, this premise is a nightmare, but for the star and playwright, the stage feels like home.

“I don’t think I had a choice. It’s literally injected into my veins like heroin,” Mindelle, 39, jokes over Zoom. Growing up, she and her father, musical theater composer Stephen Weiner, often took the train into New York City from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to catch Broadway shows. “Even in the womb, my mom was playing Evita, which is why I think I sound like a busted man’s Patti LuPone.”

She’s calling from her New York living room, and in less than an hour she’ll head to a last-minute rehearsal for The Big Gay Jamboree, her unapologetically camp new musical that’s currently running off-Broadway at the Orpheum Theater until Dec. 15.

The show pays tribute to Golden Age musicals — think The Wizard of Oz or My Fair Lady — while also poking fun at their shortcomings, with endless references to musical theater and pop culture.

There’s an entire song, for example, about wanting to star in a Real Housewives show (but not Dubai), and Bravo producer Andy Cohen makes a surprise cameo. (His response to the email pitch? “He was like, ‘Oh my God, LOL, hashtag justice for Dubai.’”) And the entire second act pays homage to Jennifer Lopez, who serves as surprise inspiration for Mindelle’s character, resulting in the show’s catchiest song, “Jennifer Lopez Has a Backup Plan.”

“[My creative partner and I] always pay tribute to someone that would not otherwise get such royal treatment, who’s so iconic, but maybe not necessarily for the right reasons, just kind of constantly being in the tabloids,” Mindelle says. “And that is Jennifer Lopez.”

This isn’t the first time she’s incorporated a celebrity into her show. On one drunken night while working dinner theater in Los Angeles, she co-wrote a “rinky dink” jukebox musical in which Celine Dion (played by Mindelle) would tell an exaggerated version of Titanic using her hits.

Titanique, as it was called, became a massive off-Broadway success — Dion hasn’t seen it yet, but many folks on her team have. (“I always said if I was performing and she was in the audience, I would faint and she would take my place. Somehow the musical would end exactly the same.”)

“Big Gay Jamboree is wacky, reverent, goofy, campy, and so gay.”

This isn’t to say creative success came quickly to Mindelle. After four years originating secondary roles on Broadway — Gabrielle in 2013’s Cinderella and Sister Mary Robert in 2011’s Sister Act — she followed her dreams of writing musicals out to Hollywood.

“I got onto Broadway. How hard could it be to be a writer in Los Angeles?” she says jokingly. “Pretty f*cking hard.”

On the West Coast, Mindelle and creative partner Jonathan Parks-Ramage wrote The Big Gay Jamboree as a movie musical, the script of which got the attention of Margot Robbie. The actor helped them sell the project to Paramount, but after years of notes and development delays, the project fell apart.

Eight years after heading West, Titanique brought Mindelle back to New York, where the musical’s played off-Broadway since 2022. (She stepped away from the lead role in June 2024.) In a bizarre full-circle moment, Robbie attended a show and emailed Mindelle. “I was like, this is a scam. She’s doing Barbie right now,” she says. “Turns out it was Margot Robbie, and she said, ‘Titanique was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen. I told a million people about it. Are you working on anything else?’”

Soon enough, Robbie’s production company, LuckyChap, jumped on board. The Big Gay Jamboree opened the show in September 2024, a few blocks away from where Titanique still plays.

“Big Gay Jamboree is wacky, reverent, goofy, campy, and so gay,” says Mindelle, who identifies as part of LGBTQ+ communities. “But what I love the most is that there is so much heart to it, and a transformation with my character, and I think that is 100% because of Margot.”

While Mindelle has embraced her position as a figurehead for queer off-Broadway extravaganzas, eventually she’d love a full-circle moment that brings her back to Broadway — she’s human! — whether with Titanique, Jamboree, or another comedy-musical she hasn’t yet created. “But if I die tomorrow and these shows keep playing off-Broadway, it doesn't get much better than that,” she says.