Leading The Big Parade

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By Marc Peyser

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If you're 4-foot-11 and talk like a kewpie doll on helium, people don't always take you seriously. For instance, the last time Kristin Chenoweth ordered flowers for a friend. "She never got them," she chirps. "I called to find out what happened, and they told me, 'It says here that a child was using your credit card'." Yet Chenoweth, 33, has a supersize talent. She's already stolen so many shows she should be in jail. In 1999 she won a Tony for "You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown." Her 2001 sitcom "Kristin" tanked, but this week she's back on TV, with Matthew Broderick in ABC's "The Music Man." Chenoweth plays Marian, the snooty librarian who falls for the shady traveling salesman Harold Hill. Marian usually plays second fiddle, but Chenoweth's boundless warmth and heart-melting soprano end up leading this big parade. "Kristin has a soul that other Broadway ingenues don't have," says "Music Man" executive producer Craig Zadan. "She's a dynamo." Up next: "Wicked," a Broadway musical back story to "The Wizard of Oz" in which she plays the good witch Glinda. With her Billie Burke voice and her goody-two-shoes past as an Oklahoma cheerleader, this sounds like typecasting, but Chenoweth says no. "Glinda has some issues," she says. Being short, perhaps?

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