Lucie Arnaz Sings her Favorite Songs of The Great White Way
Lucie Arnaz learned the importance of doing what you love from her parents, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz.
“I saw how much they loved the business. They did something they really loved,” Arnaz recalls.
At seven years old, Arnaz loved putting on plays in the backyard of her Beverly Hills home and singing with her girlfriends to Bye Bye Birdie.
At 11, she made her television debut in The Lucy Show; later becoming a series regular playing Lucy’s daughter in 117 episodes of Here’s Lucy.
Then, of course, the inevitable happened.
“When I was fifteen, I went to New York and saw Angela Lansbury in Mame, Arnaz recalls. “That was the deciding factor for what I was going to do with my life. I said, ‘That’s it!’”
The love of the theater stage stole her heart, and in 1979, she made her Broadway debut playing the unforgettably wacky Sonia Wolsk in the Neil Simon/Marvin Hamlisch/Carole Bayer Sager Broadway musical They’re Playing Our Song.
“Being a star in a hit Broadway show,” Arnaz says, “that’s like being Cinderella at the ball every night.”
Arnaz went on to star on Broadway in Lost in Yonkers, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Pippin; and in the first national tours of Seesaw, Whose Life Is It Anyway? and My One and Only with Tommy Tune. She loved playing the devil-loving Alexandra in London’s West End production of The Witches of Eastwick.
“Singing, to me, is telling good stories through song, and good stories can be funny stories or sad, romantic ones,” Arnaz has said.
This month, she’ll be at Irvine Barclay Theatre in I Got the Job! Songs From My Musical Past, singing the songs she’s loved throughout her storied life on the stage.
The daughter of two Hollywood legends, Lucie Arnaz is in a spotlight of her own.