South Coast Repertory raises funds with ‘Sex and the City’ benefit performances

Break out those Manolo Blahniks, have your Cosmopolitans at the ready, and prepare to brunch — “Sex and the City” has come to town.

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And if you have absolutely no clue what that first sentence is about, now’s your chance to get in on one of the most pervasive pop culture phenomena of the past 30 years, explained by the writer who started it all, Candace Bushnell.

For this weekend only, Bushnell brings her one-woman show, “Candace Bushnell: True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City”  to South Coast Repertory as a benefit production for the theater. Performances are Saturday, May 30, at 2 p.m. and 8 p.m. and Sunday, May 31, at 2 p.m.

“It’s really the origin story of ‘Sex and the City’ — how I created it, how hard I worked to get there, and why I invented Carrie Bradshaw,” Bushnell said on a recent call from her home in Sag Harbor, New York, where it was a rainy afternoon. “And then I tell the real story of the real Mr. Big.”

For the uninitiated, the character of Carrie Bradshaw is considered Bushnell’s alter ego; an attractive single woman living in New York City who works as a popular columnist and eventually an author, who moves in a constellation of three best friends and their revolving romantic partners, with “Mr. Big” being Carrie’s longtime heartthrob. In real life, Bushnell wrote a column for The New York Observer that was adapted into the bestselling “Sex and the City” anthology. The books launched a cultural juggernaut, becoming the basis for a long-running HBO series, two movies and a recent reboot of the original series called “And Just Like That.”

“In my show, we play the game ‘Real or Not Real,’ which is video clips from the show contrasted with my real life,” she said. Hint: Reality is rarely like the glamorous show.  “For instance, do you remember when Carrie dated the senator? Well, I dated a senator. But he was a short bald man.”

And Mr. Big? “Between you and me, I like (former vice president of Condé Nast) Ron Gallotti a lot, but people have looked up his photos on the internet and they’re like, ‘Man, he’s ugly.’ I’m like, OK, so he was balding. Most men, I’m sorry, are not as good-looking as Chris Noth (the actor who plays Mr. Big), but whatever.”

Bushnell recalls that early on, she sensed her writing, which rendered (some) women’s experiences with sex, relationships and career issues with bold candor, would hit the zeitgeist.

“When I got the column, before it was even a TV series, I felt like it was going to be big. I felt like it was my big break. I just had this instinct,” she said. “But I guess it wasn’t until, like, after two years that the show had been on the air that people started saying to me, hey, this is a success, it’s a phenomenon. I mean, we shot the pilot and then a whole year passed before they ordered the series, and then another whole year passed before they ordered the second season.”

How did she know she’d really made it? “One time I was in London and I went to the club, Chinawhite,” she said, referring to an exclusive, VIP nightclub popular with celebrities and royals. “There was an aristocratic guy in there who was saying to me, ‘Oh, you’ve ruined it for men like me. Now women are on to us. We can’t be (expletive) the way we were before.’ I was like, ‘Wait, wait, it’s come over here to London? And everyone’s watching it here?’ So that was when I was getting an inkling of how big it was.

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“And then when they made the first movie, that was pretty incredible because they blocked off a whole street block in the city,” she adds, referring to Manhattan. “There were all of these barricades, and walking down the street, you know, it was lined with fans who were screaming. So that was fun.”

Bushnell launched her one-woman show in 2021 off-Broadway. “That was pretty amazing. I think I was 62 when we started doing it,” said Bushnell, who early after moving to New York once took an acting class. “I went to acting school for maybe four months. I like to say six months, but honestly, I hated it. We had to do things like pretend to be a piece of pepperoni on a pizza. Then we had to brush our teeth in front of the class, and I thought, ‘I can’t.’

“It was definitely never on my bingo card to imagine I’d be doing an off-Broadway theater show.”

Since then, she’s performed it at New York’s famed cabaret lounge Café Carlyle and all over Europe — twice at the London Palladium to sold-out crowds — but said Orange County was always on her list.

“South Coast Rep was one of the early supporters of the one-woman show. I’d been hoping to come for the last few years, actually, and now we’re finally able to make it happen,” Bushnell said. “You know there’s (philanthropist) Jane Yada and some other people I know who were around at the beginning of putting together this one-woman show, so it’s very exciting and pretty great to be there.”

In fact, on Thursday at Ocean 48 in Fashion Island, Yada, one of the hosts and committee chair for the South Coast Repertory fundraiser, was expected to be among other leading Orange County society mavens for a “Girls Night Out” dinner with Bushnell, the kickoff event to the weekend of one-woman shows. Other event hosts and sponsors scheduled to walk the “pink carpet” included Stephanie Argyros and Wendy Hales of the Argyros Family Foundation; Elizabeth Segerstrom, co-managing partner at South Coast Plaza; private jeweler Mona Lee Nesseth; Suzanne Appel, South Coast Repertory managing director; and Paula Tomei, SCR’s retired managing director.

Each performance includes a pre-show South Coast Plaza shopping experience featuring brand partners on-site at SCR.

Bushnell said she created the show because she realized how much it has been a source of bonding among fans of the story. She added, “Grab your ‘Sex and the City’ friends and come!”

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