Heather Gay's Confessions of a Theatre Kid: 'RHOSLC' Star on Playing Piano, SOUTH PACIFIC & More

While Heather Gay's performance on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City Season 4 finale may have rivaled a Shakespeare drama, she's been used to the spotlight long before the hit Bravo series.

With a lifelong love of musical theatre and extensive piano performance experience, Gay has given us the receipts, proof, timeline, and screenshots to look back on her love of the performing arts. Read more about her early days of performing, a high school production of South Pacific, and her juicy new novel, Eternal Glow.

---

The Early Days

How did you get your start in performing?

Like every big Mormon family, we had family talent shows and family reunion talent shows where you were absolutely required to perform like talent shows. So if you better have a real notable talent or make one up. Sometimes I remember my siblings just having to read a Shell Silverstein poem, but with a narrative tone because that was the only talent they had.

My parents put me in piano lessons when I was really little and I ended up being kind of like a child prodigy when it came to piano performance. I was touring around the nation before I was 10 years old. I performed at Northwestern. I won the State of Colorado Early Elementary Piano Competition. I was like a noted traveling piano performing child.

I was just confident walking onto a stage, playing the piano in front of an auditorium of teachers and students and things like that. So that kind of got me over the stage fright, but that was my first performing experience.

Starting in Musical Theatre

Piano was my outlet for performing, but musical theater was our only entertainment in our home. I didn't get to really do it until I got to junior high. My first credited role was as Katie, the lesser-liked friend. I had to sing a duet and I remember the song was, "If I had a friend, I would share all I own." It was this really embarrassing song to sing when you're a seventh grader, because you had to plead for acceptance. I remember thinking it wasn't good casting. How is anyone going to believe that I want a friend?

Olympus High School's South Pacific

I was cast as "Nurse #1" in Olympus High School's production of South Pacific. My very best friend was cast as Nellie Forbush and my other very best friend was cast as Bloody Mary. I was thrilled to just be part of the production. Of course, you want the roles, but I was happy to just be in the ensemble.

But Nurse #1 was credited and I got to do "Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair." I got to do it all. After that performance, Nellie Forbush's mother came up to me –  and her daughter was the star – and she came up to me and she pulled me aside and she said, 'You have a special sparkle on stage.' She's like, 'I couldn't take my eyes off you.' That's lasted my whole life. Whenever I film a Housewives dinner, think "You have a special sparkle."

Ratification

When I grew up Mormon, every two years we would do a road show and every ward or parish had to perform a self-budgeted, self-produced parody play with a good value meaning. That year was Ratification. It had some sort of patriotic thing going on, but the perspective of our play was what happened with the rats that lived underneath the floorboards while our Founding Fathers were debating and signing the Constitution? We had giant cardboard feet that we were afraid of and giant founding fathers feet and we were the rats and cats like underneath the stage.  

Only original submissions were accepted.

How It Prepared Her For the Real Housewives

Did your background in theatre help prepare you at all for Bravo's The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City? 

Anyone that like loves to be dramatic and loves to like play pretend would love being a Housewife. I really haven't ever thought of [RHOSLC] as theater, but I sometimes joke that it's unstructured improv. The thing that's different about Housewives that is the biggest departure from my theater kid experience is that while we may look like an ensemble, we're all in the starring roles, which causes many, many problems.  It's not a collective as much as it's just, you know, six sisters fighting for the spotlight. That would be the biggest departure.

You have to love who you are and love being obnoxious and be fearless about showing up. I always watch Broadway performers and I've always tried to get best seats I can and I love when there's spittle and sweat and I just think they don't care if they look cool. They to want to sound amazing. I just love that like you have to be okay with not looking cool. And if you're and I think that's kind of at the core of it.

I just think that it's just doing what's best for the group and not always best for yourself.

Cast A Real Housewife

Is there a fellow Real Housewives of Salt Lake City cast member that isn't a theatre kid, but could be?

Well, none of them would be. But I think Angie Katsanevas, Angie K, she can turn it on like this. She's got such broad appeal and she just makes me laugh. And she is definitely not afraid to take the fall to be funny. I think she would have been a great theater kid.

On Writing Her First Novel, Eternal Glow 

It's a complete departure. They're all made up people. It's all made up things. The only things that are real are the dynamics between the women, the locations where it all happens, the Sprinter vans, and the fact that it's built in the beauty industry, which is the industry I built my business on.

Since the first day I opened [Beauty Lab & Laser], I thought about the dark fears of what if? Like every customer that comes to a med spa: you sit in the chair, you get a needle in your face and it could go terribly wrong. I was just fascinated with the people that were willing to trust us so much and get a procedure based on a recommendation from their friends, the peer pressure involved, the status, the hierarchy, and just the eternal never ending quest to be beautiful, to be perfect and to belong.

Eternal Glow on Stage?

If you were to turn Eternal Glow into a musical or play, who would you cast?

So Celeste is loosely based on Britani Bateman. Just a lot of the things I love about Britani, also the fact that Britani has never turned down a single procedure at Beauty Lab and Laser, including getting Sculptra in her hands to stimulate the collagen. So it's that kind of earnest believing, wanting the simple things, but doing it in the most complicated way. If it were cast with Britani Bateman, it would most assuredly be a musical, because I would not waste one second of her musical talent. I wouldn't leave any of those things on the floor. So I would cast her and then I'd turn it into a musical.

I'd probably give Lisa [Barlow] a role in the ensemble. She could be nurse number three.

New episodes of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City premiere Wednesdays on Bravo, streaming the next day on Peacock.

Read Real Housewives of Orange County star Heather Dubrow's Confessions of a Theatre Kid here.