Not long after winning a Tony Award at age 11 for "The Secret Garden," Daisy Eagan was on stage at Carnegie Hall singing "Broadway Baby" in a tribute to Stephen Sondheim. Now she's got her own baby, who's hitting the road with Mom, although it's unlikely she'll be steering him toward a life on the stage. It's a complicated story, involving years of professional rejection, spirals into debilitating depression, and motherhood that was neither planned nor wanted.
But little Monty, not yet 2, with his grandparents as babysitters, will be only a few floors away as Eagan premieres her new solo show as part of the Society Cabaret series at Hotel Rex on March 28 and 29. Titled "One for My Baby," it comes with the rejoinder "An Inappropriate Evening with Daisy Eagan." In other words, don't bring the children.
"My humor tends to be a little blue," Eagan said from her home in Los Angeles. "You would think that a show called 'One for My Baby' would be sort of sweet and like a love letter to your child, which in some ways it is, but there's a lot a stuff about my parenting trends that make me insane, and I definitely poke fun at myself. So, yeah, it's slightly inappropriate."
Eagan had just broken up with boyfriend Kurt Bloom, the father of her child, when she discovered she was well along with her pregnancy. They talked and talked, and asked themselves if they wanted to make a go of it at parenthood as a couple.
"That's a condensed and much friendlier version of what we went through," she said. "We didn't have a lot of time to make the decision because if we were going to take the other route we had to do it quickly, because I was going to be too far along in the pregnancy. Both he and I spent time talking with people we love and trust, and he was the one who finally said, 'I really want to do this.' That was a huge relief, because that's really what I wanted."
Some of this ambivalence is reflected in Eagan's cabaret show. "It's funny because I never wanted children and was never a big fan of children," she said. "I think at first some people might be uncomfortable, but the more honest we are about how difficult it can be, the better off we all are. I'm fiercely pro-choice, but the decision to have Monty was the best decision I could have made."
Eagan sings about a dozen songs, most of them standards, to illustrate the stories she wants to tell. When she emerged from a break from show business that she had thought was permanent, she found that the sound of laughter was even better than the sound of applause for her singing.
She quit the business in 2007, got a BA in psychology and creative writing, and had started grad school when she decided to go back on the stage. And where did that change of heart come from? "I think partly insanity," she said. "I think once it's in your blood, it's really hard to walk away from."
She made her return in a loosely structured cabaret show titled "Still Daisy After All These Years," and then got more serious in a second show with the somewhat unexpected title "Fuck Off, I Love You," in which she explored her bumpy career that had started so brightly. "I just decided that I wanted to move away from that topic," she said of the newest show.
During those difficult years, she was one of the struggling actors featured on "The It Factor," a 2002 reality show on Bravo that followed a group of New York actors in a 13-week series that was about the grind of classes, auditions, and, mostly, rejection. Eagan was the best-known, and certainly the only Tony Award-winner, among the group.
"I talked about 'The It Factor' in the last show, and I said I was edited to seem like the depressed and angry one, and by edited I mean that they filmed me and I was depressed and angry. I played a clip from the show of me sort of bemoaning my fate, and meanwhile onstage I was, like, making faces at myself. I swear, when I turned 30 and I looked back at that past decade, I don't know who that person was."
After San Francisco, "One for My Baby" has dates in several cities, and she's looking to add more. She'll have to take a break from that when she goes into rehearsals for a new play this spring at the Pasadena Playhouse, but she can't say any more about it yet.
Eagan's bouts with depression, one that even left her hospitalized, have sometimes seemed related to show business, which can be a danger now that she has returned to the tribe. "You have to be keenly aware of the early signs and deal with it," she said of depression. "I'm trying to learn to be nicer to myself and remind myself that there are enough people in the world who are going to be hard on me, and if anyone is going to treat me kindly, it should start with me."
Daisy Eagan will perform One for My Baby at the Rex Hotel on March 28-29. Tickets are $20 and $40, and are available at www.societycabaret.com