Meet Sally-Jane
The Heit family on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, NJ. Left to right: Anna (mother), Arlene, Sally-Jane, David, Lucille, Elliot, Marilyn, Raymond, Allyn, Louis (father).
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(Click on any image to enlarge.)
Connecting is what gives light to life. My shows never stay the same and that is because each audience, each individual, brings new awareness to what I have written and what I am performing. I may be doing a one-woman show, but I am doing it for and with others. It's a partnership.
~ Sally-Jane Heit |
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Sally-Jane Heit was born in Brooklyn into a tumultuous, arts loving Jewish family with eight children and modest means. Her need to garner attention among her siblings stirred her natural abilities as a performer - singing, dancing, and acting. At home, she felt like just another sister, just another daughter, but on stage, she was special and she thrived in the spotlight. As a child, she trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse and as a teenager, studied at New York’s High School of Performing Arts, where Martha Graham and Sidney Lumet served as her mentors. Her ambition was to become a big-time movie musical star. She and Betty Grable had the same shoe size.
For women of Sally-Jane’s generation, the script was marriage, children, and taking up a hobby. She found the husband and gave birth to three beautiful daughters, but performing was no hobby. It was her lifeline. While her husband attended Yale Law School, she studied at the Yale Drama School, and when they moved to Washington, DC, she kept performing: in nightclub cabarets, dinner theaters, and in summer stock productions up and down the east coast. She found that musicals suited her big personality, comic instincts, and expressive basso voice and she happily starred in Gypsy, Guys and Dolls, Sweet Charity, Dolly, Company, Kiss Me Kate, and nearly every other classic show. |
Winners of the NYC Bell of the Borough Contest. Sally-Jane (seated center right) and Diahann Caroll (standing 3rd from left). The prizes included an evening gown, a crown, and a six-week radio performance contract.
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Sally Jane with her her daughters, Dianne, Lori, and Pamela. Photo by Sally-Jane's niece, Annie Leibovitz, taken at a family wedding.
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Once her daughters were launched, she divorced the husband and moved back to New York City, where she worked steadily in film, television, and off-Broadway. Somewhere in the middle of mid-life, she finally got her big break when director and choreographer Michael Bennett (of A Chorus Line fame) cast her in the Broadway musical Ballroom. She thought she’d finally made it, but was disappointed to discover the compromises that go into getting a big show onto Broadway can destroy integrity.
The combination of a less than fulfilling Broadway experience and an inspirational conversation with Lily Tomlin about her one-woman show, The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, which was a theatrical expression of her life story, gave Sally-Jane the courage to start creating her own productions based on her personal experiences as a woman, mother, and professional caught between changing times.
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View Sally-Jane's IMDb Profile |
Sally-Jane's favorite role was Mama Rose in Gypsy.
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Playbill for Ballroom, Michael Bennett's first show after A Chorus Line, in which Sally-Jane made her Broadway debut playing a lead character opposite Dorothy Loudon.
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Sally-Jane's first foray into the one-woman show format marked the beginning of her satirical take on life in Washington, D.C., where satire reigns both on and off the beltway.
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One of Sally-Jane's many cabaret tours that took her to New York City, Los Angeles, Houston, London, and beyond.
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Sally-Jane's 8" x 10" glossy-with-resume-attached that made the rounds to agents, producers, directors, repertory theatres, and her mother.
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As a woman of “a certain age,” Sally-Jane was raised in a tradition of subservience…albeit an American subservience. Translation: she deferred to men and wore a mask ordained for her by family and society. When she began writing her first one-woman show, her courage failed, and she created an alter ego named Harriet Ferment. In order to honestly explore her life experiences she hid behind Harriet. Gradually, she found herself becoming uncomfortable hiding behind the character and eventually, once she felt properly fermented, as it were, Sally-Jane confidently claimed her story in her own name. |
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A few decades later, Sally-Jane is still going strong. Early in her life, she performed for attention and love, but now she does it because she loves going on creative journeys with audiences. Based in Massachusetts and Florida, she tours the country giving back to causes close to her heart by donating performances to theaters, universities, conferences, and community organizations. Her ambition is to inspire and support others to take center stage in their own lives.
If I think about it, my whole life I have been auditioning for myself.
I think I shall give me the part. ~ Sally-Jane Heit |
Sally-Jane today. Photo by Annie Leibovitz
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