And speaking of support, how strange does it feel to spend eight shows a week in pantyhose?
“It’s not any weirder than anything else,” Mr. Fontana had told me when we met for an iced coffee just before his final performance in Chicago. “It’s all weird. If you’re really doing your job, you’re never being yourself.” Still, he was looking forward to that last show. “Oh my God, I’m just so happy I don’t have to shave tomorrow,” he’d said. “And I don’t have to wear that corset.”
But what makes “Tootsie” weirder, aside from the corset, aside from the twinned roles, aside from barn-raising a multimillion-dollar show that lives or dies on laughter, is the moment in which it arrives. Broadway has been reckoning, slowly, imperfectly, with the idea that musical comedies need to offer female characters full interiority and that maybe abuse — physical, psychological, verbal — isn’t so forgivable or funny.
That “Tootsie” is another musical with an all-male creative team makes it essential that it does right by women, even women played by men. But doing right can’t in any way stifle its reckless, headstrong comedy. Which is all to say that Mr. Fontana has some big kitten heels to fill.
Mr. Fontana was born in Stockton, Calif., the younger child of a teacher and an agronomist. He grew up in a small town in Washington state, playing baseball and acting in school plays: Wilbur in “Charlotte’s Web,” Jesus in “Godspell.” At the University of Minnesota, he completed a classical training program and at 24 he returned to Minnesota, playing Hamlet at the Guthrie. The Star Tribune compared him to the “whiny ‘Friends’ star David Schwimmer,” then fell for his antic style.
He broke into Broadway quickly, playing mostly secondary roles, like the brother in “Billy Elliot,” like the brother in “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” He did play the prince in “Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” opposite Laura Osnes, but he wouldn’t really count that as a lead. “I would say, like, ‘I love how much Laura has to do,’” he said. His voice work in “Frozen”? Another prince, another second man.
