Bill Buckhurst’s sensational revival of the Stephen Sondheim show, starring Hugh Panaro and Brad Oscar, in a Greenwich Village theater converted into a British pie bakery. Sabel held her own in the spotlight.
“It was so big and popular, when it ended, I felt like now it’s going to go on without interruption – I have to turn down jobs,” Sabel recalled. “Then I didn’t get anything. For years. Then the pandemic came and I thought, ‘Wow, cool, the end of my life here.’ I had to pull myself together.”
She did a series of what she calls “survival jobs” – mostly in the restaurant industry, but anything that could pay the bills. She auditioned but didn’t get a role.
“Sometimes I would sit in the waiting room (for the audition) with all these amazing Broadway girls that I’ve seen and admired for years and think, ‘Look, we’re all back to square one in this little room waiting to sing a song.’ No matter how wonderful you think you are, you always end up back to square one. It’s very humbling and I try to carry that with me.”
After six years of auditioning, she landed a spot in the national tour of Beautiful in 2021, playing the title role.
“It couldn’t have come at a better time,” Sabel recalls, as the job coincided with the end of a relationship. “I went on tour and remembered my self-worth.”
