Love May Suck, but at Least Multi-Talented Gatewood Makes it Funny

Amid the chaos of Roy Arias Studios’ open casting call, Kimmy Gatewood is standing near a broken elevator swapping stories with an old friend, laughing about the latest picture in her pin-up calendar. As the two friends catch up, costume designers hand Gatewood a ’70s woolen number with gaudy plastic buttons down its length. Next it’s a pastel yellow dress with white stripes, and finally she slips into a hippie’s summer garb (complete with flowers, of course). They’ve dubbed her a “quick change artist,” and these costumes are just some of the ones she’ll be donning during the New York Musical Theatre Festival’s Next Link show, Love Sucks.

With music and lyrics by Brandon Patton and book and lyrics by Steve O’Rourke, Love Sucks is a punk-rock musical loosely based on Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. Gatewood acts as the comic relief, playing various bit roles including a stuffy music executive, a cleaning lady, and a quintessential ’70s girl who gets dumped by her punk-rocker boyfriend.

“Female characters can be very underwritten, or sometimes they don’t come across as funny when guys write for girls,” Gatewood said. “But he [O’Rourke] wrote some very funny characters for me.”

After landing a new job this summer, Gatewood was hesitant to add NYMF to her ever-growing list of commitments.

“But, you know, Martian Entertainment is behind it, and they did Altar Boyz and [title of show],” Gatewood said. “This opportunity was just way too good [to pass up].”
So for now, it’s musical theater this week and improv comedy the next, as the blonde-haired, ambitious actress tries to work every angle of the industry.

The night of Oct. 5 marks the opening of Gatewood’s 1940s Variety Show at The Peoples Improv Theater, where Gatewood also teaches.

“I’ve really been on a kick since doing the 1940s show of watching these old ’30s and ’40s movies,” she said. “Like ones with Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart—they are so ridiculously funny. All that Honeymooners humor kills me.”

Gatewood, who cites Steve Martin, Gilda Radner, and the Marx Brothers as some of her biggest comedic influences, will perform at The PIT with her fellow Apple Sisters, Rebekka Johnson and Sarah Lowe. The trio has a varied background. Johnson is best known for her work on MTV’s Boiling Points, while Lowe is more of a Broadway personality—she starred in Mamma Mia! in Las Vegas, taking after her grandmother Ruby Keeler, who was an original cast member in the movie and musical 42nd Street.

While Gatewood received her Actors’ Equity Association card after snagging the part of Cathleen in Long Day’s Journey Into Night alongside Elizabeth Franz (Death of a Salesman) and Sam Waterston (Law & Order), she tends to believe that she’s more of a jokester herself. Her first one-person sketch comedy, Look on the Bright Side, garnered recognition from Emerging Comics of New York and received Time Out New York’s award for best musical act in 2004.

“I had learned how to play the guitar in college, and I started singing this song Look on the Bright Side,” Gatewood said. “I sang it to my roommate, and he was in stitches. So I started singing songs in the open-mic clubs, and that sort of became my thing—I play guitar and do jokes.”

In choosing a career path that has given individuals from the likes of comedic songwriter Stephen Lynch to Weird Al Yankovic their niche in the world of pop culture, Gatewood has written numerous comedy works, such as The Engagement and The Breakup Show, and has performed at acclaimed venues around the city, including Upright Citizens Brigade and Chicago City Limits.

“I just got to interview Weird Al, which was so cool,” Gatewood said. “I fell in love with him a little bit—he’s really sweet.” The two met during the filming of the upcoming documentary Nerdcore Rising, which marks Gatewood’s first producing experience on a full-length independent film. The documentary chronicles MC Frontalot and his band, a group that creates hip-hop songs about anything nerd-centric.

After raising $15,000 from family, friends, and fans and dedicating two years of her life to the project, Gatewood marvels at the inception of Nerdcore Rising.

“It was just one of those things, you know,” Gatewood said. “I directed this girl Negin in her solo show, and one day we were just sitting in her living room. She was like, ‘You want to do a documentary about these guys who rap about dungeons and dragons?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sounds cool.’”

And as if being a comedian, actress, teacher, producer, and director isn’t enough, Gatewood also does voice-overs on television commercials. Most recently she can be seen on MasterCard’s advertisement with Peyton Manning, although she claims TGI Friday’s four-dollar appetizer commercial as her all-time favorite.

“It was hilarious because they would put a brand new thing of food in front of us every time, and I was like, ‘Ugh, triple meat fajita, ugh,’” she said, laughing. Fred Goss (Carpoolers, Sons & Daughters) directed the commercial and “the girl I was doing it with—you know, we just had a blast.”

In the coming years, Gatewood hopes to immerse herself in the television industry after staring in Sarit Catz’ pilot, What She’s Having, as part of the New York Television Festival earlier this month.

As a graduate of Syracuse University’s acting program in the School of Visual and Performing Arts, Gatewood confesses that she once strongly considered becoming a biology major at University of Maryland.

“I wrote my essay for college, and the title was ‘The Tap Dancing Biomedical Researcher,’” she said, sipping on her soy latte and flipping through the pin-up pictures on her laptop, a modern technology she can’t leave home without. “You look back at that and you’re like, I was a senior in high school, and that’s what I really wanted to do—I wanted to be able to somehow combine both of them.”

“I don’t know what it is, but I’ve just always been that type of girl who’s had her fingers in every pie.”