Mira Sorvino is finally living her Broadway dream with 'Chicago'

Over 20 years after passing on her first Broadway opportunity, the Oscar-winning film star is making her debut as Roxie Hart in the long-running musical.

Before Hollywood came a-calling for Mira Sorvino, she was a kid in Tenafly, New Jersey, performing self-written plays with her childhood friend Hope Davis and acting in school and community theatre productions. She still remembers the first acting lesson her father, Tony Award nominee Paul Sorvino, gave her at age 10, when she had trouble kissing a boy in H.M.S. Pinafore.

"He said, 'Just imagine Elvis Presley is standing out there on that stage, and you have the opportunity to go and plant a kiss on his cheek,'" Sorvino recalled. "I was elated, and I would run out there every night. He said that is called emotional preparation, and every night it would work for me."

The rest is history: Sorvino went on to a successful Hollywood acting career, winning an Academy Award for Mighty Aphrodite and leading fan-favorite films like Romy & Michele's High School Reunion. Between screen gigs, she's also performed in Off-Broadway and regional shows, created the one-woman cabaret My Life in 20 Songs for NYC's Cafe Carlyle, and even sang at the historic Maxim's de Paris restaurant in Beijing. But she had unfinished business with Broadway, a goal of hers since girlhood.

"I was the theatre kid, and then for some reason, I veered away from it, not on purpose," Sorvino said. "Somehow my life took me away from New York after a while, [and] obviously, film was a little more lucrative than stage, and once you have four kids and they're in school, life happens, right?

"There was a point [in] the '90s or early aughts where I was offered Cabaret," Sorvino continued, referencing the musical's 1998-04 Broadway revival. "All of a sudden it changed from a six-month commitment to a one-and-a-half-year commitment. I couldn't do it. My schedule just wouldn't allow me to. I had other commitments for films and things, and I've always regretted that."

It would take over 20 years for Sorvino to find her way back to Broadway, but she’s now finally making her debut as Roxie Hart in Chicago from September 15 to November 2.

"To do a musical and to have this level of singing and dancing as part of this iconic character on the Broadway stage, it's a lifetime dream achieved," she said.

Many stars have stepped into the triple-threat role of Roxie, a 1920s murderess whose fight for acquittal is just a stepping stone to her true goal: fame. First premiering in 1975, Chicago has become a classic (this production, from 1996, is the second-longest-running in Broadway history) with a score by Cabaret composers Kander and Ebb and iconic Bob Fosse choreography reimagined by Ann Reinking.

Enthusing about these details, Sorvino showed the depth of her love for the theatre world, which was cultivated off stage as much as on it during her youth. "I cannot remember [my] first show, because I saw, like, 40," she said. Since moving from Manhattan to Tenafly when Sorvino was 3, her family would regularly take Broadway trips on weekends.

"I saw all these legendary shows, like After the Fall, Agnes of God, Children of a Lesser God, West Side Story, Brighton Beach Memoirs, Annie, and we would meet all the performers afterwards," Sorvino said. She was too young to see her father's Tony-nominated performance in That Championship Season in the '70s, but she watched him on stage multiple times in later years.

Her own theatre return coincides with the Off-Broadway premiere of a Romy & Michele musical adaptation and precedes filming of the long-anticipated movie sequel, for which she and Lisa Kudrow are returning, in the spring. It's a rare occasion in which Sorvino's stage and screen careers are colliding, and she's just enjoying the ride.

"It was like a dream deferred, and now I'm getting it. Very few people get to have a dream like this in their second act, right?" Sorvino said. "I am having the time of my life."

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Photo credit: Mira Sorvino. (Photo courtesy of production)