‘SNL’ comedian Ana Gasteyer gets to show off her other talent

If the phrase “Schweddy balls” strikes a chord, you know Ana Gasteyer.

At least the Ana Gasteyer who, starting in 1996, spent six years as a “Saturday Night Live” regular, memorably impersonating personalities from Hillary Clinton to Martha Stewart and Caesars Palace headliner Celine Dion.

Leading the list of Gasteyer’s signature fictional characters: Lilith Fair poetess Cinder Calhoun, middle-school music teacher Bobbi Mulhan-Culp and NPR “Delicious Dish” host Margaret Jo McCullin, who definitely loved those Schweddy balls Christmas treats.

Before Gasteyer became a TV fixture, however, she was a college music major — at least until she discovered comedy. Post-“SNL,” she’s starred in everything from Broadway musicals (“Wicked,” where she played green-skinned heroine Elphaba on Broadway and in Chicago) to movies (from “Mean Girls” to the made-in-Vegas “Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2”) to TV series (“Suburgatory”).

Sometimes, however, Gasteyer gets the chance to show off both her musical and comedy talents — as she’ll do when she returns to The Smith Center’s Cabaret Jazz this weekend.

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“I’m not creating a character — I’m me, (so) it’s a more honest evening,” Gasteyer says in a telephone interview from New York, where she was headlining the legendary Cafe Carlyle, which she likened to “stepping into an old piece of New York history.”

Because it’s Gasteyer performing, however, the laughs come naturally.

“I’m not a very serious person,” she acknowledges, only half in jest, noting that “I always travel with my kazoo and my bicycle horn — and my flask.”

With sassy musical numbers — from the updated jazz standard “I’m Hip” to “crazier, nuttier” novelty songs — plus jokes and stories, “it’s kind of my perspective on the world,” Gasteyer says. “I’m a party-thrower.”

All of which makes Las Vegas in general — and Cabaret Jazz in particular — an ideal venue, in Gasteyer’s view.

“So much of the stuff I’m drawn to, the kind of throwback-y music,” comes directly from the late 1950s and early ’60s, the Rat Pack era when “there was an expectation, in a supper-club environment, of both comedy and music,” she points out. “It’s a pleasure to work in a place like Vegas, where it’s less of a hurdle to explain.”

Gasteyer says she was “thrilled” when Smith Center officials asked her to return, following her Cabaret Jazz debut in February 2015.

“It’s a great room,” she says of the club, with “a smart and loving crowd, which is exactly what I like.”

The nature of the crowd plays a definite role, Gasteyer adds, because cabaret performances as “really interactive — they’re live and organic. It’s like a live, breathing organism,” where the audience “feels very connected to the stage.”

In a concert hall, by contrast, “I march across the stage, and sing, and leave,” she says. At Cabaret Jazz, “you’re a part of the room. It’s like throwing a party.” (There’s that “party” image again.)

For all her comedic chops, however, music came first for Gasteyer, who enrolled as a voice major at Northwestern University (where she was a few years behind another “SNL” alumna, Julia Louis-Dreyfus). But the campus’ Chicago-adjacent location gave Gasteyer easy access to the birthplace of improv comedy,” and before she graduated she’d switched her major to theater.

Next, Gasteyer headed to Los Angeles to join the Groundlings comedy troupe, home to numerous “SNL” standouts, including Laraine Newman, Phil Hartman, Jan Hooks, Jon Lovitz and Will Ferrell, alias Bobbi Mulhan Culp’s equally nerdy spouse and fellow teacher, Marty Culp.

So when Gasteyer returned to music, “I came back to it on my terms,” she notes. “I love musical theater,” but the eight-performances-a-week nature of the art form limits spontaneity.

Unlike cabaret, where it’s “very improvisational, very emotional, Gasteyer comments, “and very live.” In short, precisely the place for audiences to “sit back, tap your toes and have your martini.”

Read more stories from Carol Cling at reviewjournal.com. Contact her at ccling@reviewjournal.com and follow @CarolSCling on Twitter.