It’s Cher and share alike for co-star of ‘The Cher Show’ musical

In a unique bit of Broadway storytelling, “The Cher Show” presents the life of the pop icon represented by three different actresses during various eras.

But Catherine Ariale thinks that still isn’t enough.

“I think we could even have more than three, y’know?” said Ariale, who plays Lady in the middle of the show’s musical timeline. “She’s so multifaceted and you can see so many layers and each one is different. But her essence is obviously always there, her core. She’s constantly reinventing herself and even now, in her 70s, she’s always coming up with something new to do and staying relevant.”

“The Cher Show,” which features the singer’s 30 solo and duo hits with former husband Sonny Bono, comes to Century II for four performances next weekend, wrapping up the Broadway in Wichita season.

Ariale interacts with the other Cher portrayers, known as Babe and Star, several times.

“It’s really nice to see the three different versions of yourself in these eras of your life. For the audience, it’s good to see the three of us on stage,” she said from a tour stop in Syracuse, N.Y. “You look up to your older self, and your older self is giving your younger self advice. It’s the kind of things we do in real life, in a way, we look back on our mistakes and the decisions in our life and learn from them as we grow older.”

Ariale literally taps in on stage to take over from the actress playing Babe, who shows Cher’s teenage years with a love for music and music and a desire to be famous. Babe meets Sonny Bono and they hit big with their first hit, “I Got You Babe,” and are then offered a residency in Las Vegas.

“She is so scared to be in front of a crowd and has stage fright,” Ariale said of Babe. “In the show I kind of tap her on the shoulder and take the mic away from her and take over.”

Ariale’s Lady takes over for Sonny & Cher’s rise to TV fame with their own musical-comedy hour.

“Lady just really has confidence at that time. She grew into herself and her star power in those years to really have agency over herself, what she wanted and who she was,” Ariale said. “You see all of the beautiful parts of her and Sonny’s relationship, but also how it started to crack and crumble in their time of working together. We see how he was pretty controlling and didn’t let her have a lot, and worked her really, really hard. It’s interesting we learn so much about the two of them in the time I have to do.”

Lady relays the Cher baton to Star for the remainder of the show, although she appears several times later.

Growing up in northern Virginia, Ariale said she wasn’t a big Cher fan. Ariale’s mother, however, was a fan since childhood and even begged her own mother to invite Sonny and Cher to their house for dinner.

“My mother didn’t understand at a young age you couldn’t invite just anyone over for dinner,” Ariale said with a laugh. “When I got the role, she was quite helpful for getting me in the zone.”

After watching countless hours of “The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour” online, Ariale gained appreciation and respect for her as a performer.

“I read what she was going through, and I got to view some of the dry and witty humor that the two of them did on their comedy hour, and I fell in love with her there,” she said. “I think she holds such power and is so in her element at that time of her life – really confident in her power and her life.”

Portraying Cher has given Ariale new appreciation for the performer.

“You have to have a certain amount of respect for them, respect and love for their story,” Ariale said.

“I can’t imagine playing someone and not becoming a fan, just because the process of being an actor leans toward that.

“I knew the hits, and I knew the iconic looks. But I didn’t know the depth of her.”

She said she learned, as the audience in the show will, that Cher’s life was not all glitz and glamorous gowns.

“People come and they may know nothing about her, and they leave feeling empowered and ready to take on whatever they want to take on in their own lives and feel confident and inspired by her,” Ariale said. “It shows what an incredible impact she’s had on culture.”

A graduate of Pace University in New York, Ariale had never played a real person before Cher.

“There’s a lot more freedom with a fictional character,” she said. “You see somebody playing, like Elphaba or Galinda (from ‘Wicked’), and you can kind of make it your own. There’s a beauty to that. With this, I have to do it justice. She’s not a caricature. She’s a real person.”

Now in her second tour cycle of playing Cher, Ariale said she got tips for the actress-singer’s enunciation from the actress playing Star: “Imagine you have an egg in the back of your mouth, and you don’t want to crack the egg. You get a bit of a Cher voice.”

Ariale said she worked hard to learn all of Cher’s mannerisms.

“She had a specific way that she’d lift her long hair, so I made sure to watch that and I don’t do it any differently. I keep it pretty exact to what she did, but I bring a little of myself to it. That’s what theater is,” she said. “It’s a fine balance, something I’ve played with.”

Although Cher gave her approval for the script and the original Broadway run in 2018-2019 – where Stephanie J. Block won a Tony Award for playing Star – the singer hasn’t see this tour.

“I wouldn’t want to know until after,” Airale said. “It’s a dream someday to meet her. It would be wonderful.”

Ariale’s two-year tour ends in a few weeks, when she’ll return to her partner and her cat in New York and begin the audition process for another role.

But Cher, she said, will never leave her.

“She’s just carved in my heart right now,” Ariale said. “I love her.”

‘THE CHER SHOW’

When: 7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, April 25-26; 2 p.m. Saturday, April 26; 1 p.m. Sunday, April 27

Where: Century II concert hall, 225 W. Douglas

Tickets: $54-$118, from Century II box office, selectaseat.com or 316-755-7328