KLINE IN IVANOV AND ICE
All I's appear to be on Kevin Kline these days leastways, he seems to be stuck in starring vehicles that start with that vowel: First (and, perhaps, most startling) of all, he can be found in person eight times a week, beginning in October, at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont Theater, having a game go at Chekhov's Ivanov. Later on in the month, he'll slip next door to Avery Fisher Hall one night for The Ice Storm, which will world premiere as the opening-night attraction of this year's New York Film Festival. Joining him there will be other New York stage actors who people that picture: Sigourney (Sex and Longing) Weaver, Joan (The Heidi Chronicles) Allen, Jamey (All My Sons) Sheridan, John Benjamin (God's Heart) Hickey and Michael (Racing Demons) Cumpsty. Director Ang Lee considers his adaptation of Rick Moody's novel about the wife-swapping suburbs of the 1970's the exact opposite of his previous film: "In Sense and Sensibility the social code wants you to be rational and good, and the characters want to be bad; in The Ice Storm, the social code wants you to be bad, and actually they're not so bad after all they still want to be good!" . . . Kline's third 'I' Paramount Pictures' In & Out is a gay-themed film farce based on a famous Oscar-acceptance speech: When Tom Hanks won the award for Philadelphia, he inadvertently "outed" his college prof on national television. Forum producer Scott Rudin assigned that premise to Jeffrey playwright Paul Rudnick and voila! a screenplay was born! WHAT'S NEW, BUENOS AIRES?
The film version of Evita, the Andrew Lloyd Webber/Tim Rice musical that made stage stars of Elaine Paige (London) and Patti LuPone (New York), just went to video, starring Jonathan Pryce, Antonio Banderas and, of course, Madonna as the legendary Argentine. . . . Last year's rush of Shakespearean cinema has reached the video stores: Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet via Columbia and the finally filmed Twelfth Night from New Line.
IN THE GROVE GROOVE
Grove Press had such a success publishing the theatre offerings of Steve Martin Picasso at the Lapin Agile and Other Plays that it is now putting out two of the screenplays he wrote for himself: L.A. Story and Roxanne. Clearly, something more than a wild-and-crazy guy is at work here. . . . That early-20th-century moralist who set the stage world on its ear before she took on the screen world is delineated with considerable fascination by Emily Wortis Leider in the new bio released by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Becoming Mae West.
-- By Harry Haun
