Gossip Girl of the Week: Katori Hall

CURRENT GIG Being the toast of the town in London. That's what happens when your play (in this case, her Martin Luther King drama "The Mountaintop") wins the Olivier Award.

AGE 28.

BORN AND RAISED Memphis, Tenn.

ALMA MATER Columbia University.

WHAT THE LONDON CRITICS SAID "Breathtaking, hilarious and heart-stopping." (The Independent, "The Strange Last Night of Dr. King.")

"Sometimes a play comes out of the blue and knocks everyone for six. . . . It is a beautiful and startling piece." (The Telegraph, "The Mountaintop, at Trafalgar Studios.")

AND SHE ACTS TOO She's done "Black Nativity" at Classical Theater of Harlem and "Law & Order: S.V.U." on NBC.

WHAT'S UP NEXT Opening "The Mountaintop" on Broadway this fall. At least that's the plan.

WHY PRESIDENT OBAMA MEANS SO MUCH TO HER "When I was a kid, I told my dad I wanted to be president and he said, 'You know they ain't gonna let you do that."*

*From an interview in the London newspaper The Guardian.

Gossip Guy of the Week: Eddie Redmayne

CURRENT GIG "Red," playing the opinionated young assistant of Mark Rothko (Alfred Molina).

AGE 28. (Born Jan. 6, 1982.)

BORN AND RAISED London.

AVAILABILITY Single.

ALMA MATER Cambridge (Trinity College). He also went to Eton with Prince William.

BIG BRITISH AWARDS Named outstanding newcomer by The Evening Standard and the Critics' Circle, for "The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?" And just this month he won a best-supporting-actor Olivier for the London production of "Red."

BROADWAY DEBUT This is it.

A THING FOR THE TUDORS, CLEARLY On screen he's played Southampton in "Elizabeth I," Thomas Babington in "Elizabeth: The Golden Age" and William Stafford in "The Other Boleyn Girl."

PRETTY ENOUGH TO BE A MODEL And he has been, for Burberry.

CLAIM TO TEEN-IDOL FAME Starring opposite Kristen Stewart, heroine of the "Twilight" movies, in "The Yellow Handkerchief."

NOT THAT HE HAS A DAUGHTER (YET) "I love this, but I wouldn't put my daughter on the stage." ("Eddie Redmayne Interview," The Telegraph, London).

"Red," by John Logan, directed by Michael Grandage, Golden Theater, 252 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Opening night: April 1, 2010.

And Now We're (a Month) Old

CHEERS! It was on Feb. 28, 2010, that theatergossip.com posted its first items: a clever theater quiz, including a question about the puppet cleavage in "Avenue Q"; a resentful tribute to Scarlett Johansson, who was being praised to high heaven for her performance in "A View From the Bridge"; our first Gossip Girl and Gossip Guy of the Week, Zoe Kazan (appearing in "A Behanding in Spokane") and John Pankow (playing Shakespeare in "Equivocation"); and a feature of dubious future called Running Lines, theatergossip's answer to Metropolitan Diary.

If you've missed any of the March items, there's still time to take a look at these (we've thrown in a few updates) and more:

At Dame Edna (above, with Michael Feinstein), our oldest Gossip Girl of the Week to date. The reviews for "All About Me," her show with Feinstein, may be tepid, but her version of Stephen Sondheim's "Ladies Who Lunch" is worth getting dressed and going to Midtown for. Let's hope Elaine Stritch has a chance to catch it. (Don't get me wrong. Stritch still owns the song and always will. But Dame Edna is now in a strong, unforgettable second place.)

At Sondheim, who is our oldest Gossip Guy of the Week so far. He turned 80 on March 22, as you may have heard if you have been paying attention to theater news at all. And just to cap off a week of tributes and celebrations and early previews for "Sondheim on Sondheim," they renamed a theater for him. Henry Miller's on West 43rd Street (where "All About Me" is playing) will soon be the Sondheim.

At Judith Ivey, our most recent Gossip Girl of the Week. A few days after that item was posted, Ivey opened in "The Glass Menagerie," and Charles Isherwood of The New York Times declared her work in it "surely the performance of her career."

At the admiring essay about fag hags, making memorable appearances in this season's first-rate, gay-themed plays. Among them: Andrea Riseborough (below, with her male co-stars) in "The Pride." In the 21st century, the play teaches us, she's a fabulous best friend to gay men. In the 1950s, she might have been married to one.

And at other items -- about Kathleen Turner, Larry Kramer, Paul Rudnick, Christopher Walken, Variety, the "Phantom" sequel and all those American winners (eat your heart out, West End!) at the Olivier Awards.

And more to come.



(Apologies, and thanks, to Gawker for the headline.)

Oh, to Be in England on Olivier Awards Night

SURE, the Tony Awards in New York are glamorous (even if the American television-watching public outside New York would rather watch paint dry than check them out), but they're months away. The Olivier Awards, however, were given out on Sunday night at Grosvenor House in London, with a high glamour quotient and a few surprises. Including a satisfyingly large number of American sources. Here are some of the big winners.

RACHEL WEISZ (above, with her award) was named best actress for the perennially juicy role of the emotionally needy Blanche Dubois in "A Streetcar Named Desire," the Donmar Warehouse production. Americans like Weisz, too. We gave her a supporting-actress Oscar for "The Constant Gardener" not long ago. (But have the Brits seen Cate Blanchett's Blanche in the "Streetcar" production that came to BAM earlier this year?)

MARK RYLANCE took the best actor award for his role as Rooster Byron, the British countryside equivalent of trailer trash in "Jerusalem." On these shores, Rylance won the Tony Award for best actor in a play for the comedy "Boeing-Boeing" two years ago.

"THE MOUNTAINTOP" was a surprise winner as best new play. The work of a 28-year-old American playwright -- Katori Hall, of Memphis, Tenn. -- it's an imagining of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s last night on earth. The play is expected to hit Broadway this fall.

"SPRING AWAKENING," by Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater, received the best new musical Olivier. And ANEURIN BARNARD was named best actor in a musical for his role as the rebellious young boy who impregnates a 14-year-old. The Oliviers weren't altogether unexpected, because Americans gave this show eight Tony Awards, including best musical, in 2007. The difference is that it was a big box office hit in New York; in London, it was a commercial flop.

"THE PRIORY" was named best new comedy. It's the story of a group of 30-somethings having a reunion, which the theater critic Michael Billington of The Guardian called "The Big Chill meets Agatha Christie."

"HELLO, DOLLY" took best musical revival, and SAMANTHA SPIRO, who played Dolly Levi, the matchmaker who knows how to make an entrance, was named best actress in a musical.

"CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF," with an African-American cast, was named best play revival. The production starred James Earl Jones as Big Daddy, the Southern patriarch who hates mendacity, and Phylicia Rashad, as Big Mama, his vastly unappreciated wife.

The Oliviers are named for Lord Laurence Olivier and have been presented since 1976. Mere parvenus, of course: the Tonys have been around since 1947.

Gossip Guy of the Week: Raúl Esparza

CURRENT GIG Playing the lunatic-mistaken-for-a-doctor J. Bowden Hapgood in "Anyone Can Whistle," the latest offering in the ever-remarkable Encores! concert series.

AGE 39. Born Oct. 24, 1970.

BORN AND RAISED Wilmington, Del., and Miami. (Cuban-American parents.)

ALMA MATER New York University. (B.F.A., 1992.)

AVAILABILITY Unclear. Separated from his wife (his high school sweetheart) for a very long time.

BEST KNOWN FOR Making Bobby, the 35-year-old birthday-boy lead, steaming-hot sexy in the 2006 Broadway revival of "Company."

BROADWAY DEBUT "The Rocky Horror Show" at Circle in the Square (2000), playing Riff Raff, the hunchback who sings "The Time Warp."

SILLIEST BROADWAY SHOW HE'S BEEN IN "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" (2005), as the bumbling inventor Caractacus Potts.

THOUGHTS ABOUT THE MEANING OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION "The truth is, it's not a person, not a place, not an experience. It's you, who you are." (As told to Joyce Wadler in The New York Times; "Breaking Character.")


"Anyone Can Whistle," by Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents, directed by Casey Nicholaw, City Center, 131 West 55th Street, (212) 581-1212, nycitycenter.org. April 8-11, 2010.

Gossip Girl of the Week: Judith Ivey

CURRENT GIG Playing Amanda Wingfield, the quintessential monstrous mom, in the Roundabout Theater's new revival of Tennessee Williams's "Glass Menagerie."

AGE 58. Born Sept. 4, 1951.

BORN AND RAISED El Paso, Tex. Then the family moved around a lot.

ALMA MATER Illinois State University.

AVAILABILITY Married for 21 years to Tim Braine, a television producer.

FINEST BROADWAY MOMENT Delivering the line "I am a drug person" in David Rabe's "Hurlyburly."

TONYS SHE"S WON Two, both for featured actress in a play. One for "Hurlyburly" (1985), the other for "Steaming" (1983), in which she did a Cockney accent and delivered many of her best lines while nude.

HOW MIDDLE AMERICA MIGHT KNOW HER From the sitcom "Designing Women." In the hit show's last season (1992-93), she portrayed B. J. Poteet, the replacement for the replacement for Delta Burke's character.

STUFF SHE'S DIRECTED, HERE AND THERE "Steel Magnolias," "Bad Dates," "Two for the Seesaw," "Vanities."

WHEN SHE MOVED TO NEW YORK FROM THE MIDWEST June 12, 1978.

HOW MUCH SHE LOVES DOING "THE GLASS MENAGERIE" "I have wanted to play this part since I was 18 years old. I read it in English class."


"The Glass Menagerie," Laura Pels Theater, 111 West 46th Street, (212) 719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Opening night: March 24, 2010.

In Praise of the Fag Hag, Recognized at Last

IN "Next Fall," after a discussion of one character's views about God, the afterlife and whether he sees homosexuality as a sin, Holly (Maddie Corman, above, far left), a single, heterosexual candle-store owner, and her gay friend Adam (Patrick Breen, center, next to Patrick Heusinger) are saying good night when they have this exchange.

Holly: "Are fag hags allowed in heaven?"

Adam: "There's no sin in being a fag hag."

Holly (after a few seconds' thought): "Aiding and abetting."

You go, girl! That's what's been missing in so many serious films and plays that depict the lives and loves of gay men. The supportive, irreverent, fabulously intelligent and witty best friend, who happens to be a straight woman. But in a theatrical year that has been called the season of the gay play, this character is finally making an appearance.

To be fair to the writers of these fictional tales, there was Mary-Louise Parker setting the standard in Craig Lucas's "Longtime Companion" (1989). And Debra Messing's character in the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" had some fine fag-hag tendencies. But on the continuum with Harry Hamlin, Michael Ontkean and Kate Jackson in the silly coming-out movie "Making Love" (1982) on one end and Tony Kushner's AIDS masterpiece "Angels in America" (1993) at the other, the women in gay men's lives tend to fall into one of two categories: betrayed wife or disapproving mother.

THE exceptions, you may say, are the characters played by Julia Roberts (with Rupert Everett) and Jennifer Aniston (with Paul Rudd) in the late '90s in "My Best Friend's Wedding" and "The Object of My Affection." But in the first case, the story is really about the woman (the gay male best friend is a well-documented cinematic type). And in the second, things get all complicated with a pregnancy and confusion about loving friends and loving lovers. By the end, Aniston's character might as well have been a betrayed wife.

But now we have Holly in "Next Fall." When Luke (Heusinger) has an accident, she's at the hospital first, making a herculean effort to carry on a normal conversation with Luke's oblivious, bigoted Southern parents, while waiting for Luke's partner, Adam, to arrive. And there she is in all the flashbacks -- sympathizing, entertaining, scarfing down Chinese food with her gay pals.

And we have Sylvia (Andrea Riseborough) in "The Pride." In the half of the play set in 2008, she's the animated, profane, outspoken pal who sympathetically advises Oliver (Ben Whishaw) to fight his addiction to anonymous sex, which she calls "the slut stuff." She's madly in love with an Italian guy but not too busy to attend the gay pride parade with Oliver and his ex, Philip (Hugh Dancy).

In the other half of the play, set in 1958, Sylvia is Philip's soft-spoken wife, who invites Oliver, a children's-book author, over for drinks and feels something in the air between the two men. A few months later, she discovers that they've been having an affair.

No wonder the average fag hag is such a big fan of Stonewall and the era of openness that followed. Just look at what we may have been spared.


"Next Fall," by Geoffrey Nauffts, directed by Sheryl Kaller, Helen Hayes Theater, 240 West 44th Street, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Opening night: March 11, 2010.

"The Pride," by Alexi Kaye Campbell, directed by Joe Mantello, Lucille Lortel Theater, 121 Christopher Street, (212) 279-4200. Opening night: Feb. 16, 2010.

What's That Screen Doing Onstage?

OR, in the case of the sketch at left, what are those dozens of screens doing?

Forming larger screens, television monitors, to show off the talking head of Stephen Sondheim in between musical numbers in "Sondheim on Sondheim," opening on April 22 at Studio 54. Here's a show where the set designer, Beowulf Boritt, and the projection and video designer, Peter Flaherty, take center stage. Both literally and figuratively. (We're pretty sure the tiny figure in red is supposed to be Barbara Cook.)

Elaine Liner on theaterjones.com ("Ready for Your Close-Up?") picked up on a recent New York Times Arts & Leisure article about projection design written by Anita Gates, who is of course theatergossip.com's esteemed founder.

The gist of that article ("The Screen's Now Setting Many a Stage"): The use of projection design, whether with stills or moving images, is becoming a major part of theater productions both on and off Broadway. And the question is whether that's a good thing or a bad thing for the theater in general. After all, airline passengers still ignore the flight attendant doing the safety demo in the flesh but happily stare at the exact same thing when it's on the little movie screens above them.

A note of hope was sounded from an unlikely source. Flaherty, the young projection and video designer, doing an advance interview about "Sondheim on Sondheim," said, "You can put as many film clips and video screens and interactive devices onstage as you want, but liveness is still liveness. The liveness is still the reason that theater is theater."

Did we mention that starting this fall you can major in projection design at Yale?

It's About Time Kathleen Turner Played a Nun

SHE'S hardly the first movie star to do Connecticut theater in recent history, but there's just something about Kathleen Turner. So Hartford is all atwitter at the news that Turner will be appearing at TheaterWorks Hartford this summer.

She'll be starring in the world premiere of "High," a drama about a recovering-alcoholic nun (one of our favorite kinds) and a 19-year-old drug addict she's trying to help. "High" was written by Matthew Lombardo, whose current claim to fame is having written "Looped," the Tallulah Bankhead comedy now on Broadway with Valerie Harper as Bankhead. Clearly, Lombardo has a thing for tough broads.

Turner is one of the toughest. Fans have known that since she turned to William Hurt on a hot summer night in "Body Heat" close to 30 years ago and said, "You're not too smart, are you?" Pause. "I like that in a man."


7 Kathleen Turner Questions You're Probably Asking Yourself Right Now


1. How old is she? 55, pushing 56. Born June 19, 1954, in Springfield, Mo.

2. Is she married at the moment? No. She and Jay Weiss divorced in 2007, after 23 years of marriage.

3. When did she gain all that weight? It's been coming on gradually. She looked great in "Peggy Sue Got Married" (1986), but she was definitely no longer the femme-fatale sylph she had been in "Body Heat" (1981), her moment of perfection.

4. Why? Some say it's because of the medication (steroids) for her rheumatoid arthritis.

5. Is she deliberately choosing roles now that make her look unattractive and undesirable? Sure looked that way when she played the dog trainer in "Marley & Me" (2008) and in her recent appearances on Showtime's "Californication."

6. How much theater cred does she have, being a Hollywood actress and all that? It's pretty high. She's had two Tony Award nominations, for "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" in 1990 and for "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in 2005. Things didn't go so well in "The Graduate" (2002), but who could resist casting Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson? With a (very carefully lighted) nude scene.

7. When did she lose her virginity? At the age of 19 in a bed in the back of a van. Afterward, she wrote in her memoir, she thought, "Well, that's not much of anything."

Gossip Guy of the Week: Stephen Sondheim

CURRENT GIG "Sondheim on Sondheim," a Broadway musical at Studio 54 beginning previews this week, timed to honor his latest milestone birthday. Sondheim appears as a virtual character, on multiple television screens.

LAST SEEN Visibly enjoying his own music at "Sondheim: The Birthday Concert," the all-star canonization held on Monday at Avery Fisher Hall. ("A Little Birthday Music")

AGE 80, on March 22.

PHOTOGRAPH TAKEN Somewhat earlier.

BORN AND RAISED New York City. The Upper West Side (at the San Remo).

ALMA MATER Williams College.

AVAILABILITY Single.

BROADWAY DEBUT The lyrics for "West Side Story" (1957), from "When you're a Jet/You're a Jet all the way" to "There's a place for us/Somewhere."

BEST KNOWN FOR "Company," "Follies," "A Little Night Music," "Into the Woods," "Assassins," "Sunday in the Park With George," Sweeney Todd" -- oh, just check out IBDB for all the others.

IS THEATER REALLY DEAD? "You can't bring it back. It's gone. It's a tourist attraction." And this was 10 years ago. (In an interview with Frank Rich, "Conversations With Sondheim.")

LYRICS OF WISDOM "No one is alone." "Everybody dies." (From "Into the Woods" and "Company" respectively.)

"Sondheim on Sondheim," by Stephen Sondheim, directed by James Lapine, Studio 54, 254 West 54th Street, (212) 719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Opening night: April 22, 2010.

Gossip Girl of the Week: Dame Edna Everage

CURRENT GIG "All About Me," an evening of two one-person shows and a bit more, with Michael Feinstein.

ALIAS Barry Humphries

TRADEMARKS Harlequin glasses, lavender hair, great legs, calling people "possums."

AGE 76

BORN AND RAISED Melbourne, Australia.

AVAILABILITY Widowed, with three grown children. (Barry Humphries is married to Lizzie Spender, daughter of the poet Stephen Spender.)

PREVIOUS BROADWAY EXPERIENCE "Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance" (2005), "Dame Edna: The Royal Tour" (1999).

BROADWAY DEBUT "Oliver!," in which Humphries played Mr. Sowerberry, the undertaker, back in the '60s.

WHY SHE WON'T HAVE A FACELIFT "I like to think cosmetic surgery comes from within," Dame Edna told a Cairns newspaper, "and that my own kind and serene nature really shows on my face."


"All About Me," by Christopher Durang, Michael Feinstein and Barry Humphries; directed by Casey Nicholaw; Henry Miller's Theater, 124 West 43rd Street, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Opening night: March 18, 2010.

Christopher Walken, Warped and Wild

HERE at theatergossip.com, we do not, as a rule, review shows. Plenty of other people are doing that. But occasionally a performance just demands a blog-ovation.

Go, go, go to see "A Behanding in Spokane," Martin McDonagh's latest, immediately. Christopher Walken (above, having a memorable conversation with his character's mother) reaches new warped comic heights in this play as a flagrantly deranged man in a dumpy hotel room, looking for his hand, which was severed decades ago. And which two young con artists claim to have. (behandinginspokane.com)

Terry Teachout's review in The Wall Street Journal called the production "the funniest new play to open in New York since I started writing this column." ("What the Right Hand Is Doing")

If you have somehow missed Christopher Walken in your movie- and theater-going past (and if so, where have you been?), here are the basics:

1. He's an old guy. He'll turn 67 later this month.

2. He's been married to the same woman for 41 years. (She's a big-time casting director who worked on "The Sopranos.")

3. He's a New Yorker, born and raised in Queens.

4. He blew people away comically as Diane Keaton's suicidal little brother in "Annie Hall."

5. He blew people away dramatically, and won an Oscar, as the Russian-roulette-addicted American soldier in "The Deer Hunter."

6. He actually intended to become a dancer and periodically amazes audiences by showing off his considerable talents in that area.

7. He was on the yacht the night Natalie Wood drowned.


Rumor has it that the first thing Walken does when he gets a script is to take a pen and cross out all of the punctuation. That could explain a lot.


"A Behanding in Spokane," by Martin McDonagh, directed by John Crowley, Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, 236 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200, telecharge.com. Opening night: March 4, 2010.

There's a New 'Phantom' in Town (London)

IT is a very big and important thing that "Love Never Dies" opened in London this week. If the name doesn't mean much of anything to you now, it will. For better or worse. For richer or poorer.

"Love Never Dies" is Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequel to "The Phantom of the Opera," the most commercially successful Broadway show of all time. If you're 22 years old, "Phantom" has been playing on Broadway since you were born. The sequel's stars, Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess (above), play the lead characters from "Phantom" 10 years after the events in the original show.

Lloyd Webber has sent the disfigured phantom and his true love abroad -- to Coney Island, of all places -- and there is a love child. The critics in London gave the production mixed reviews, but that doesn't mean for a second that the show won't be arriving in New York this fall or that it won't be an unqualified smash hit wherever it plays.

*Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph is a big fan of the sequel. "This is Lloyd Webber's finest show since the original 'Phantom,' " he wrote, waxing poetic about "a yearning romanticism that sent shivers down my spine." ("Love Never Dies, at the Adelphia Theater") When Spencer calls the show "like a relic of another age," it's a compliment.

*Paul Taylor of The Independent had some reservations but he declared the production "seamlessly fluent, sumptuous and sometimes subtle" with "dark-hued, yearning melodies." ("First Night: Love Never Dies")

*But Michael Billington of The Guardian summarized the show as "a welter of great tunes in search of a strong story." ("Love Never Dies, Adelphi, London") The sequel, he concluded, lacks "narrative tension."

*And although Ben Brantley of The New York Times is not a London critic, what he says ("Same Phantom, Different Spirit") matters on both sides of the Atlantic. Brantley wrote, among other things, "If you don't know the first 'Phantom,' you will be very confused; if you do know the first 'Phantom,' you will also be very confused."

Variety Loses Its Mind and Fires Top Critics

I WAS just about to sign up and actually pay for the online version of Variety when I heard the news. Variety, that 105-year-old bastion of entertainment news and criticism, had just fired its chief theater critic (David Rooney, left).

Not because they were unhappy with his work. Not because they had somebody else in mind for his plum job. But because "it doesn't make economic sense to have full-time reviewers." They'll just have freelancers do the job from now on. Cheaper, you know.

[Todd McCarthy, Variety's chief film critic, was also let go. But we will leave that to other sites to analyze and lament. Roger Ebert has already weighed in, announcing his displeasure and the cancellation of his Variety subscription.]

The media reacted to Rooney's dismissal by pointing out just how important and valuable a guy he was. A Los Angeles Times blog post referred to him as "a big player in American's pre-eminent theater town." In the same article, Robyn Goodman, the Broadway producer ("In the Heights," "American Idiot"), sang Rooney's praises. "He wasn't trying to write quotes that would end up on someone's marquee or make people laugh or sound trendy," she said. He actually cared about the work.

ROONEY himself hasn't hesitated to speak out, talking about "the ongoing erosion of arts coverage" in an online Time Out article. There's no longer any doubt that "the critical voice is being undervalued," he said. And he doesn't think highly of the plan to replace seasoned, experienced critics "with random freelancers filing to a copy desk where whoever happens to be there is editing that copy with no expertise and no experience in that field." He told Playbill.com that covering theater had been "hands-down the most fulfilling experience of my professional life."

Timothy M. Gray, Variety's editor, shot out a memo to his staff about the firings, of course. Calm the troops down. Reassure them. The most appalling sentence in that memo: "Today's changes won't be noticed by readers."

If that's true (and I begin to worry that it may be), every person who thinks professional critics may know a little more than the average teenager posting in a chat room has reason to go to bed crying tonight. Even more disturbing is the fact that Variety began in 1905 in New York, covering vaudeville. I wonder what year they fired the vaudeville critic.

No, Please, Not 'The Miracle Worker' Too

THEY did everything right, in marketing terms. The consensus was that no show could make it on Broadway this season without a movie star, the most glorious reviews of all time or both. But no problem, thought the producers of "The Miracle Worker." They had Abigail Breslin.

Who could beat that? Little Abigail, the 13-going-on-14-year-old who charmed moviegoers out of their box-office dollars as an unlikely beauty-pageant contestant in "Little Miss Sunshine" four years ago. Little Abigail, who could act as well as be adorable, if her Oscar nomination was any indication. Little Abigail, who was practically an American Girl doll come to life. Little Abigail, whom lots and lots of theatergoers' daughters would be dying to see. Playing Helen [expletive] Keller!

So why, two days after opening night, were the producers talking about the possibility of closing? It's the same story as for Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs" earlier this season. People just weren't buying tickets.

The production has Alison Pill (above left, with Breslin) as Annie Sullivan, Helen's teacher. A Tony nominee for "The Lieutenant of Inishmore" and, for fans of the film "Milk," an unforgettable presence as Harvey Milk's take-charge lesbian campaign manager. Matthew Modine, a popular stage and screen veteran, is Helen's father. And the director is Kate Whoriskey, a hot property because of the way she'd handled the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Ruined." It's possible to see the two plays as parallel because both are about damaged girls.

"Brighton Beach Memoirs" had a hot new director too. (David Cromer, fresh from "Our Town.") And that did them no good.

O.K., it was a very bad sign that Ben Brantley's review in The New York Times ("Taming a Child") summarized the production as "sadly pedestrian." Right in the first paragraph. The play "delivers full emotional frissons only in its final, fail-safe scene," he wrote.

But there was enough praise for Breslin all around to make hers a must-see performance.


TERRY TEACHOUT, The Wall Street Journal's longtime critic, loved Breslin. He called her performance "jarringly intense" and "downright remarkable." John Simon, writing for Bloomberg News, agreed, writing about a "tremendous performance" that managed "to be both demonic and touching." Linda Winer of Newsday praised her for "a sweet desperation and go-for-broke physicality."

Keep in mind an old truth: Show me six critics in a room, and I will show you seven different opinions. Variety gave the play a politely positive review. Elisabeth Vincentelli in The New York Post was crazy about the final scene but pronounced the production as a whole "too timid." Joe Dziemianowicz in The Daily News was on the negative side ("often wan") but really liked another child actor, Lance Chantiles-Wertz, who played "Annie's ghostly little brother."

I looked back at the New York Times review for the original production of "The Miracle Worker" to see if it was an unconditional rave. And it wasn't, really. In 1959, Brooks Atkinson declared Anne Bancroft's performance as Annie glorious and Patty Duke's as Helen "absolutely superb." But he wasn't at all happy with the show overall, complaining that it still looked like a television play (on which it was based).

But the 1959 production ran on Broadway for two years and was made into a cherished 1962 film that won Oscars for both Bancroft and Duke.


MAYBE this situation is not all about the reviews. I was invited to one of the post-opening press nights and asked three different friends to accompany me, with the guarantee of good seats and the likelihood of an audience light on tourists. No reviews had appeared yet, and none of the three were theater insiders who might have heard buzz, good or bad. But one begged off with a previous engagement, and the other two simply said they had no interest in that play.

Is this show just too earnest for us? "The Miracle Worker" is the story of a little girl --- blind, deaf and mute --- who could make no connections with the world and a dedicated, determined young teacher with problems of her own who took charge, fought like hell and succeeded in introducing that child to the world with all its wonders. If it came along today, they might have put it on Lifetime.

As I was debating this idea with myself last night, Will Forte popped up on the Weekend Update segment of "Saturday Night Live" and did a routine that included the line "Helen Keller said 'wa!' " Wherever we are right now on the continuum of sincerity and skepticism, it's someplace where Helen's moment of enlightenment is a punch line. (If you're one of the people who never saw the movie, "wa" is the syllable that Helen triumphantly utters when Annie has succeeded in conveying the concept of water to her. The heavens open, and angels sing.)

Still, 10-year-old girls aren't that cynical. At least I hope not. And wouldn't it be nice to take the kids to a Broadway show that doesn't have a fairy-tale princess or a flying nanny? As Winer, looking around the theater at "The Miracle Worker," wrote in Newsday: "One can watch young people get caught up in a genuine reality show. That's worth a lot."


"The Miracle Worker," by William Gibson, directed by Kate Whoriskey, Circle in the Square Theater, 235 West 50th Street, (212) 239-6200, miracleworkeronbroadway.com. Opening night: March 3, 2010.

theatergossip.com's Gossip Guy of the Week: Brandon Victor Dixon

CURRENT GIG "The Scottsboro Boys," the Kander and Ebb musical about the notorious 1931 Alabama rape case. Starring with John Cullum and Colman Domingo, he plays Haywood Patterson, the best known of the young black men falsely accused of raping two white women.

AGE Late 20s

HOMETOWN Gaithersburg, Md.

AVAILABILITY Single

ALMA MATER Columbia University. He finally got his degree in theater in 2007 ("I promised my father"), after having dropped out in his senior year to accept a role in "The Lion King." He played the grown-up Simba on tour.

BEST KNOWN FOR Playing Harpo, Sofia's surprisingly capable-of-change husband, in the Broadway production of "The Color Purple" (2005). It won him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical.

PLAYING AGAINST TYPE In the Encores! production of "House of Flowers" in 2003, he was Royal, the barefoot mountain boy who sings the title song.

WEST COAST EXPERIENCE Playing Ray Charles in "Ray Charles Live!" at the Pasadena Playhouse.

GOTTA LOVE A MAN WITH CONFIDENCE "I know I'll get another job," he told The Daily News of Los Angeles when he was playing Ray Charles. "I don't say that in an arrogant way. But I trust this hasn't been a fluke so far."


"The Scottsboro Boys," by John Kander, Fred Ebb and David Thompson, directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, Vineyard Theater, 108 East 15th Street, (212) 353-0303, vineyardtheater.org. Opening night: March 10.

Gossip Girl of the Week: Valerie Harper

CURRENT GIG "Looped," in which she inhabits Tallulah Bankhead, the outrageous, husky-voiced, alcoholic, drug-abusing, openly bisexual and highly quotable actress of the 1930s and '40s.

AGE 69 (some sources say 70).

BORN AND RAISED Suffern, N.Y. (Rockland County) and Jersey City, with several places across the country in between.

AVAILABILITY Married, to Tony Cacciotti, since 1987.

BEST KNOWN FOR Rhoda, of course, the nicest Jewish girl in Minneapolis. Rhoda Morgenstern was the heroine's wisecracking best friend on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" in the early '70s and then had her own spinoff, "Rhoda," set in New York.

AWARDS HISTORY Four Emmys and a Golden Globe, all of them for the same character, on "MTM" and "Rhoda."

OTHER IMPOSING WOMEN SHE'S PLAYED ONSTAGE Golda Meir in "Golda's Balcony," Pearl S. Buck in "All Under Heaven."

BROADWAY HISTORY Started as a dancer in the late 1950s. Came back later in life (2001) to replace Linda Lavin in "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife."

THINGS SHE HAS IN COMMON WITH TALLULAH Being female, American and white.

REASON SHE'S FOUND TO ADMIRE TALLULAH "She had a great theater discipline. No matter how badly she wanted a drink, she'd wait until after the performance."*


"Looped," by Matthew Lombardo, directed by Rob Ruggiero, Lyceum Theater, 149 West 45th Street, (212) 239-6200, loopedonbroadway.com.

*As told to The Baltimore Sun.

For a Good Time, Call Paul Rudnick

Part II of a report on the March 1, 2010, post-"Temperamentals" talkout

In Which We Learn That Classical-Music People Are Mean to One Another and That the Theater Will Never Die.

IT was probably a serious question when Paul Rudnick (left) was asked if, during his formative years, he came to divide the world into gay people and straight people.

"No," he said, "I always divided it into people from New Jersey and people from New York."

Rudnick, the author of "Jeffrey" and "I Hate Hamlet" and the screenplay for "In & Out," was the first speaker at a talkout (that's like a talkback but out?) after Monday night's performance of "The Temperamentals" at World Stages Theater. He shared the stage with Larry Kramer, the gay-rights leader; Jon Marans, the author of "The Temperamentals"; and Jonathan Silverstein, the production's director.

The cast had to be in a good mood, having awakened to Ben Brantley's glowing, affectionate review in that morning's New York Times. And Rudnick, 52, kept the party going with light comments on all kinds of subjects.

The most vicious artistic community
"Theater gets a reputation for being vicious and backbiting. But the nastiest world, hands down: classical music. And those people will tell you about it."

When Kramer came to see "Jeffrey," Rudnick's groundbreaking 1993 Off Broadway play
"You said going to see 'Jeffrey' made you want to go on a date."
(Kramer responded, "I still want to go on a date.")

When his parents took him to a show in New York every year for his birthday
"I had unerringly bad taste as a child. I would always pick the worst musical."
(He offered "Dear World," a 1969 Jerry Herman musical based on "The Madwoman of Chaillot," as an example.)

Whether theater, which has supposedly been dying for half a century, will go on
"There will always be hopeless theater rats. I remain one."

How he used to love reading scripts in the bookstore
"Was there a Samuel French? That's a very good question."

Yes, Paul, there really was a Samuel French. The man whose name is on all those paperback scripts at every actors' bookstore was a savvy mid-19th-century American entrepreneur. He started his play-publishing business in New York in the 1850s, teamed up with a British partner and eventually moved to London, leaving his son in charge of the New York office. French died in 1898. And if you see it on theatergossip.com --- even if the info came from Wikipedia and from French's London office --- you know it's true.

Photograph: © Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.

Sing Out, Louise! . . . The Grand Old Man of Gay Rights Visits 'The Temperamentals'

POLITICS visited the "Temperamentals" stage on Monday night, and not the 1950s variety that the play, about the creation of the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles, deals with.

Asked what he thought of the gay-rights movement today, Larry Kramer, 74, whose name was synonymous with that movement in the late 20th century, said, "We've got a little putz in the White House that's ignoring us."

At least I believe that's what he said. Kramer (above, right, with Paul Rudnick on Monday night) was so soft-spoken during most of the "talkout" following the performance that many of his comments were inaudible, at least to some of us in the fifth row. Just as I was thinking "Larry Kramer is too important to be told to speak up," the man in front of me shouted, "Speak up!" and some variation on "Get a mike!" But Kramer just looked surprised.

At first I attributed this to his health. Kramer had a liver transplant in 2001, and he was diagnosed as H.I.V. positive back when Madonna was young. Jesse Green's December 2009 profile of him in New York Magazine ("Larry Kramer's Boundless Outrage") suggested an explanation for his longevity: "the virus perhaps having found that rare human host more ornery than itself." But after reading Green's profile, I wonder if the cause might not be his hearing loss, which causes some people to overcompensate by practically whispering. Or maybe that's just his speaking style. But that's kind of hard to believe about the guy who founded ACT UP.

These points, however, were heard loud and clear:

1. Larry Kramer is sort of tickled that a course in leadership taught at the Kennedy School at Harvard covers "everybody from Stalin and Hitler to me."

2. He's crazy about "The Temperamentals," saying, "I am getting rabid about why this play is so important."

3. Organized opposition to gay marriage sometimes makes him want to throw up his hands and give up. Asked how gay marriage will harm the institution of heterosexual marriage and family, these people "don't even have a good bogus explanation."

4. He's very excited about "The American People," the gargantuan book he's been working on forever, and says he's now being taken seriously because it's being published by a big-time house: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

5. He's hopeful that "The American People," which of course means gay American people, will prove one important thing: "We've been here since Day 1, and we weren't any different than we are now."

"The Temperamentals," by Jon Marans, directed by Jonathan Silverstein, New World Stages, 340 West 50th Street, (212) 239-6200.

Photograph © Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.

COMING SOON: PAUL RUDNICK'S THOUGHTS THAT NIGHT.

Liza and Mario Cantone on the Same Stage . . . . . Can It Be? Can We Get Tickets?

WELL, wouldn't we all like to be at the Hudson Theater on Monday night (March 8)? It's the Vineyard Theater's annual gala, which was set to be obscenely theater-star-studded to begin with.

The dapper David Hyde Pierce is the host. John Kander is the guest of honor, at least partly because the Vineyard's next production (now in previews) is "The Scottsboro Boys," an honest-to-God Kander and Ebb musical. Fred Ebb died in 2004, of course, but he left behind a body of unproduced work, which his partner has been able to shepherd into reality. ("Curtains," which starred Mr. Hyde Pierce, was one.) Chita Rivera, Joel Grey and Karen Ziemba (currently shining at the Long Wharf in "Sylvia") are among the scheduled entertainers.

But the most interesting news is that Mario Cantone (above, in his natural element), the stand-up Laugh Whore himself, is on the bill. And so is Ms. Liza Minnelli, to be accompanied by Billy Stritch. Now. I was at the Henry Miller the night Natasha Richardson, starring in "Cabaret," insisted that Liza come onstage with her after the curtain calls. And I have never seen a facial expression that more clearly said, "Please just let me go home." So. What will happen if Mario wants Ms. Minnelli to help out with his Liza impression? Or his Judy Garland impression? Some very lucky people will find out soon.