Sarah Stiles speeds from Broadway to Netflix in Kevin James' 'The Crew'

A soundstage on Long Island may not be Broadway, but for Sarah Stiles it's the next best thing. The Tony Award-winning Broadway star, best known for "Tootsie" and "Hand to God," is back in front of a live audience — this time, with a camera rolling. Stiles stars in Kevin James' new sitcom "The Crew," which premiered Monday on Netflix, as Beth Paige, the office manager of Bobby Spencer Racing, a down-on-its-luck NASCAR crew that's always one stumble away from disaster. "She's just joy and fun and a bit of a spitfire, and she's kind of the mom in the office. She takes care of everybody. She's just a joy to play," Stiles, 41, told the Daily News. "She's silly. She's got a lot of quirks. She has a Pez dispenser collection, she used to do pageants when she was little. Every script we would get, we'd learn these weird things about Beth." Quirky is the keyword: There's the dimwitted driver (Freddie Stroma, "Bridgerton"), the ever-anxious engineer (Dan Ahdoot), the old-school technician (Gary Anthony Williams) and the boss' daughter (Jillian Mueller) who takes over. Stiles stressed that while the show is set in the NASCAR world, there's no prior knowledge requirements, even with cameos from racers like Ryan Blaney and Austin Dillon. "I grew up in the woods with hippie parents loving theater," she joked. "I know nothing about racing." Most of the race for Stiles — who teased she only got to drive a car "about 5 feet" — is in the production. After each Friday live taping in Bethpage, Long Island — the origin of Beth's name — the cast is given the script for the next week, usually by midnight or 1 a.m. They spend the weekend learning their lines and go in for a table read Monday. Then they rehearse for three days, which often includes changing lines and jokes based on what worked best — and sometimes on James' whim, Stiles said. On Thursday, they shoot whatever couldn't be done in front of a live audience, and return Friday to film the rest. "You're putting a whole play together in, like, three days basically. That's terrifying, but there's nothing like it," Stiles told The News. "With 'Tootsie' and any Broadway show I've done, you get to really explore deep into this one moment in their life and watch this one story happen, and you do it over and over and over again. But with a sitcom, every week is a new script and new experiences and new information." ©2021 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.