Mayim Bialik Says Neil Patrick Harris Stopped Being Friends With Her Because She Refused To Give Him A Standing Ovation For “Rent”

September 29, 2021 / Posted by:

Interim Jeopardy! host Mayim Bialik recently spoke with James Cordon – hey where are you going!?! Come back, I have to tell you about Neil Patrick Harris in the musical Rent! Great. Well, I’ll tell you three then. Mayim appeared on The Late Late Show where was interrogated by an aghast James about her aversion to musical theater, something that apparently predates her being screeched at by a self-indulgent hairless cat. She can’t stand it! So much so, that she threw away a friendship with NPH because she couldn’t bring herself to stand for him during a standing ovation after a 1997 production of Rent, and he apparently couldn’t stand for the disrespect.

Back in 1997, NPH starred in a national tour of Rent as Mark Cohen. And, as the two former child actors were friends at the time, Mayim went to see his show despite not being a fan of musicals. That’s right, Beaches’ own Baby Bette thinks they are “ridiculous.” And even at the tender age of 22 (though she claims she was a teen at the time), Mayim was already saltier than a Sondheim grande dame (and she’s still here). Mayim says that at the end of the show, as the rest of the audience rose to give a standing ovation, she turned to her boyfriend and said “I don’t want to stand for this,” and in doing so, struck NPH to his very core! The Huffington Post reports:

Harris was looking right at her and “reading my lips,” she told host James Corden. When she went backstage after the play, sure enough, Harris asked: “Why did you say you weren’t going to stand up?”

“I did not have a good answer,” the former “Big Bang Theory” star recalled. “We didn’t speak for a long time.”

She must have dozed off during the title song Rent, otherwise, she would have known that the perfect response would have been to shout “Doogie, I’m not a theater person! Could never be a theater person!” It probably still wouldn’t have placated NPH’s fragile ego, but at least he would know she was paying attention. Mayim says that NPH eventually, years later, forgave her.

Harris, the “Doogie Howser M.D.” and “How I Met Your Mother” actor, eventually said he forgave her and sent flowers when he heard Bialik was carrying guilt about the incident, she said.

Five hundred twenty five thousand six hundred guffaws! This is hilarious and reminds me of Rachel Bloom’s reaction to NPH basically tweeting “I don’t know her when she was hosting the 2018 Tony Awards, despite the fact that they had met numerous times before. And her husband wrote on How I Met Your Mother. She even appeared in a scene with him! Here’s what she had to say about NPH and his delicate constitution.

And fame does that to you—where you think every kind of random, unformed thought is a gem, because you get 10,000 likes from it. He has, like, 27 million Twitter followers.

And that makes me scared about fame in general. The yes-men. Even if what you’re saying is, I don’t know, kind of weird or unoriginal, you’re still getting a lot of approval and dopamine surges for saying it. And I really, really hope that I can surround myself with people who will call me out on my shit, so that—even if I ever were to have 27 million Twitter followers—I would be just kind of… a person first, and a famous person second.

I hate to say this but justice for Mayim! She’s nobody’s yes man, man. Not only did an oversized cat shred the sleeves off her shirt before her The Late Late Show appearance, but she’s also allowed to not be a theater person! And in case you’re wondering, NPH’s reviews were fine. Variety said he was “fresh, earnest and energetic, and has a fine singing voice.” Which is a hard trick to pull off with your head fully stuffed up in your own ass!

Here’s Mayim shattering James’ theater kid heart into a million tiny pieces (starts at the 0:20 mark). Just watch, James is going to ask his manager to get him the role of Angel in the next remake of Rent just so he can win her over.

Pic: YouTube

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