Susan Blackwell

Susan Blackwell is an American actress, writer and singer, best known for playing herself in the musical [title of show] She has appeared in other plays, musicals, and television shows including Law & Order, P.S. I Love You, and Speech and Debate. She also hosts her own talk show Side by Side by Susan Blackwell on Broadway.com.

[title of show], which played on Broadway in the 2008 Season after a successful extended Off-Broadway run at the Vineyard Theatre in 2006.

The musical documents its own creation by two Broadway fans, who want to enter the New York Musical Theatre Festival and struggle to complete the show in three and a half weeks, and their two actress friends. The actors are also the writers and characters of the musical.

Blackwell's character, "Susan," is a quirky performer by night and corporate drone by day—what Blackwell calls a "distillation" of her true personality.

Blackwell became involved in the musical's development early on, through her longstanding friendships with the show's writer, Hunter Bell, and composer, Jeff Bowen (who also star in the show, as "Hunter" and "Jeff"). Blackwell had worked with the two men as part of her previous Off-Off-Broadway performing duo, the New Wondertwins.

At the time Bowen and Bell began work on [title of show], Blackwell had decided to abandon performing for a stable, corporate office job.

"I feel really grateful to my friends for rescuing me," she has said of her role in [title of show]. "They airlifted me out of very corporate ascension and plopped me down into this whole other experience."

Blackwell began her professional acting career with a two-year stint in the company of Minnesota's Guthrie Theatre before moving to New York in 1995.

Blackwell has since developed a reputation as a quirky downtown theatre artist. Blackwell performed Off-Off-Broadway with Rebecca Finnegan as The New Wondertwins, a variety act whose assortment of songs, sketches and daredevil feats included ventriloquism and making deviled eggs in their mouths.

One Village Voice reviewer wrote of the duo in 1999: "Their wordless finale, orchestrated to a space-age bachelor-pad soundtrack, is a tour de force of fascination and horror: never have soy milk and deviled eggs been used to such loathsome effect."

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