Long before “Mad About You,” Helen Hunt was mad about a musical. She was 8 years old when her father, the late director and acting coach Gordon Hunt, took her to “Godspell” off-Broadway. That day, she tells The Post, “I got very clear that I wanted to be part of what that was.”
Next week, the four-time Emmy winner will play multiple roles — housewife, teacher, community organizer — in another Stephen Schwartz show, “Working: A Musical,” running June 26-29 at New York City Center. Based on the Studs Terkel book, it features several new songs, two by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and a cast that includes former “Hamilton” stars Javier Muñoz and Christopher Jackson. “I fan-girled out over them,” says 56-year-old Hunt, who lives in Los Angeles with her daughter, Makena, 15, who just performed in her high school’s production of “Working.”
Here’s what Hunt told us about the show and the upcoming “Mad About You” reboot.
How do you prepare for a singing role — in this case, several?
You just have to sing to sing. It’s the only way I know to get it right. It’s like writing — you have to put your ass in the chair every day if you want to write, and if you want to sing, you just have to make time every day to open your mouth . . . I’ll be singing Craig Carnelia’s song, “Just a Housewife,” and “Nobody Tells Me How,” which was written by Susan Birkenhead and composed by Mary Rodgers, who was my parents’ best friend. Her husband and my father were drafted the same day during the Korean War, so the connections to this show run pretty deep to me. She was the most charming, wonderful woman, and one of the funniest people I ever knew. I’m going to sing her very complicated melody, knowing that she’s up there next to my father, making sure I’m getting it right.
Are you and Paul Reiser definitely doing a “Mad About You” reboot?
I think it’s on. We’re breaking stories, and we feel creatively excited to work on it. We weren’t sure we wanted to do it, but then we realized this would be the moment their daughter goes off to college, and so their empty nest would be a good time to revisit them. That’s what most of it will be about.
It’s funny to think that a show set almost entirely in a Greenwich Village apartment was shot in Culver City, Calif. Did you ever film here?
I was doing “Twelfth Night” at Lincoln Center later on [in 1998], so we had to shoot in New York then. I got many of the men in the cast out on the street playing construction workers.
Any favorite guest stars?
I was raised on Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner. They did our show, and that helped bring in a whole cavalcade of legendary funny people: Sid Caesar, Carol Burnett, Carroll O’Connor. Tim Conway was one of my favorites. In the finale, we discover that we are not actually married . . . so we get remarried, and Tim Conway was the person who married us. Everything he did was very Tim Conway-ish, and to have a front-row seat to that was a dream come true.
Is your daughter likely to follow in your footsteps?
They’re not even my footsteps; they’re her own — and she’s already in them.
