By Harry Haun
25 Mar 2009

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Aaron Lazar, another musical-theatre specialist (blasts at the barricade, a specialty), changes his tune here to no tune to play an altar-bound young romantic.

Why? you may rightly ask. "The play, the cast, and then Jack O'Brien. It was great fun. It was — the most — fun. It's one of the best ensembles I've ever worked with."

The two other customers of the gallery are in a considerably higher tax bracket and are played by Michael T. Weiss, in his Broadway bow, and by Marsha Mason.

Weiss already likes the sound of "Broadway actor," he admitted. "I kinda love that. It has been a long time. I started out in theatre here and then got sucked into the Los Angeles film-and-television world. I'm so happy to be doing this now. It's my favorite thing to do. I just needed a role in New York that I really adored."

The role in question is a ridiculously rich art collector, and Weiss plays the part in a rather lighthearted vein. "He's a very wealthy guy, but he has a good time with his money. Why not? Right? If I were worth $100 million, I'd be in a good mood."

Mason's character becomes a grandmother during the course of the play, prompting her to up her ante for a painting Allen personally identifies with. "She goes through a nice little arc," said Mason, who's a frequent date and actress of O'Brien's. "This is our sixth project together. We go all the way back to the mid-'70s in San Francisco at A.C.T., and then in L.A. we did Mary Stuart and The Heiress, and then Jack directed The Good Doctor for PBS, and then I did Twelfth Night at the Old Globe in San Diego."

First-night family gatherings included Lily Rabe and her mother, Jill Clayburgh, and her brother, Michael Rabe — as well as Liz Callaway and her husband, director Dan Foster, and her sister, pianist-composer-chanteuse Ann Hampton Callaway. The latter, of course, was ever-ready to improvise a song about the show. Also: "I'm going to do a benefit for the Jewish Alliance for a New World on my sister's birthday, April 13 — she won't be there, but we'll be going getting drunk afterward — and I'll be at Carnegie Hall for the centennial Johnny Mercer tribute. I forget the date of that."

Other friends of the court: Sadie Friedman (Allen's gorgeous daughter who's thinking of taking up the family trade), Kenneth Welsh (who lost both Christine Baranski and Glenn Close to Irons in the original Mike Nichols production of The Real Thing) and Bob Balaban (who in December directed Irons and Allen in their first team-effort, a Lifetime film called, and about, "Georgia O'Keefe," airing this fall).

Also: Karen Ziemba (back from rave reviews in San Diego for playing it straight: Stockard Channing's role in Six Degrees of Separation), Blythe Danner (about to follow up "Meet the Parents" and "Meet the Fockers" with "Little Fockers"), radio's Joan Hamberg (whose screenwriter-son, John, created the Fockers), Elaine Stritch, chef Rocco DiSpirito, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, Isiah Whitlock Jr. (who's going to reprise Beau Willimon's Farragut North on the West Coast with the original Atlantic Theatre Company cast, sans John Gallagher Jr., who's working on a musical with Green Day), Donna Murphy and Shawn Elliott, lawyer Mark Sendroff, John Lithgow, singer Christine Andreas, comedienne Nancy Opel (taking a night off her hilarious explosions in The Toxic Avenger that pounces on New World Stages April 6), Penny Fuller (still Dividing the Estate at Hartford Stage, between May and early July), Anne Kaufman Schneider and director Joseph Hardy.