Kiki Moritsugu at her 2023 Fringe Festival show ‘A Woman Is…’
Actor Kiki Moritsugu says she owes her existence to the Toronto Star.
In the 1960s, her father, Frank Moritsugu, was a book, TV, and radio critic for this paper, and he was assigned to interview an English-Canadian actor living in Montreal named Félixe Fitzgerald, who was then the starred in a popular Quebec movie. TV serials.
The two clicked and they kept in touch.
“There were a lot of long-distance phone calls, plus handwritten and typed letters,” says Kiki Moritsugu. “Frank was a journalist, so he probably kept carbon copies of all of them.”
Eventually they became a couple, and Félixe left Montreal to live in Toronto and raise a family, including Kiki. They got married when Kiki was three. They separated when she was 11.
Not all of her parents’ complicated personal lives — divorces, affairs — make it in her solo cabaret show, “A Woman Is…,” playing at the Toronto Fringe Festival through July 16. But she does discuss the unlikely story of how they met.
“A Woman Is…” mainly focuses on Kiki’s relationship with her larger-than-life, glamorous mother, who raised her and her two sisters after the divorce. Fitzgerald, aka Jo Hutchings, was trained at London’s prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and, according to Moritsugu, spoke in these “beautiful, rounded tones — I’m imitating her in the show.”
Born in Toronto but now in Madison, Wisconsin, Moritsugu says she idolized her mother early on and gained her own love of performing by seeing her in regional theater productions. Hutchings performed in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” at Theater Aquarius, “Private Lives” in summer stock at the Red Barn Theater.
“I saw her on stage, saw her headshots and production shots, and she was so glamorous and beautiful. I absolutely wanted to match her. The problem is she wanted me to match her too.
Moritsugu struggled to find an identity of his own early on. Her mother even insisted on choosing her audition material.
“She wanted me to be a big star and tried to live vicariously through me,” said Moritsugu.
“I took a dance course, partly because she didn’t. Dancing gave me a lot of confidence. And then I went to the Banff School of Fine Arts, when they had a musical theater program.”
Moritsugu’s big break came when she was hired in 1988 for the Canadian national tour of the blockbuster “Cats”.
“We felt like rock stars,” she said. “We walked the streets of Vancouver wearing our ‘Cats’ jackets, and people let us into clubs and gave us VIP service. It was wild. I was 22 and thought, ‘Wow, is my whole career going to look like this?’”
She moved to New York City in 1989 and stayed there for nearly 15 years, playing a variety of roles, including one in the Broadway premiere of the infamous short-lived ‘Shogun: The Musical’. Moritsugu talks about the star-crossed production on the show and makes it sound like the original “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” in terms of danger to the cast and crew.
“‘Shogun’ was the first musical on Broadway with automated lighting, flying and winches,” said Moritsugu.
“A lot of this equipment came from the rock concert world and here you had stage hands that hadn’t worked with anything automated yet. During a rehearsal, our technical director was knocked out for 10 minutes by an automated fly. During a preview, I got hit on the head and had to go to the emergency room.
“And two days before the opening, when the critics, including Frank Rich of the New York Times, were in the house, a fly tied in the first act broke loose in the second act and knocked the protagonist out cold, then the orchestra pit dived in, where the conductor had to duck aside. Someone even shouted: ‘Is there a doctor in the house?’”
While in New York, she also worked as the personal assistant to “Fiddler on the Roof” lyricist Sheldon Harnick, who passed away on June 23.
“He was a wonderful person and someone very dear and close to me,” she said. “I wanted to sing one of his songs on the show (the song ‘The Boston Beguine’, from ‘New Faces of 1952’) because he was such an important part of my life.”
She also has an entire section on the Fringe show on “yellow face,” discussing the racism she encountered in the entertainment industry.
“When I first started, I did a lot of commercials. At the time, they wanted one symbolic Asian actor or one symbolic black actor. They wanted the Asian person to be “not too Asian,” and they wanted the black person to be “light skinned.” So they could say they did their best to be diverse, even though they wouldn’t have used that term back then. They just paid lip service.”
The fact that she very rarely met other half-Asian, half-white people made her realize how pioneering her parents were.
“This was in the ’60s, the era of Loving v. Virginia,” she said, referring to the seminal Supreme Court case that struck down state laws banning interracial marriage in the US. “It was very unusual.”
Moritsugu ends the show with “Maybe This Time,” the big 11 o’clock song from “Cabaret,” and it has a special meaning to her.
“My mom told me never to sing anything that Judy Garland or Liza Minnelli sang because I would be compared to them and wouldn’t measure up,” she said. “So this is me taking ownership of the song.”
Moritsugu’s mother died 20 years ago and she admits she wouldn’t have been able to write – with co-writer Danielle Dresen – or perform the show had her mother been alive. (Her father, journalist Frank, just celebrated his 100th birthday last December.)
“Her death was devastating, but also liberating,” Moritsugu said. “It meant I had a chance to finally forge my own identity and not feel conflicted about what I was meant to be.”
And what would her glamorous mother have thought of the show?
“I think she would have had a hard time with it,” Moritsugu said. “I’m pretty honest about my feelings. They are complicated. But to me, that’s what makes us so interesting. Human behavior is the most fascinating subject there is. That’s probably why I’m an actor, to explore all that.”
