"I suppose there were other people who could have played it," Wolfe admitted later at the post-party held at Gotham (nee Chase Manhattan Bank) at Broadway and West 36th, "but Tonya was the first choice because I knew her and I knew she'd be perfect for it."

This from the man who has already directed Pinkins to one Tony (for Jelly's Last Jam) and now, probably, another. The consensus among the first-nighters was that Wolfe wasn't crying wolf, either. Several folks express the regret that Pinkins had to go through the formality of a Tony vote before she got her just desserts. They were ready to throw it to her then and there after her big, heart-wrenching 11 o'clock number which goes on for seven minutes. Broadway hasn't seen such a scorching, surefire-award-winning work since Jennifer Holliday served notice in italics that she wasn't going in Dreamgirls. Whew!

Pinkins professed she doesn't know how she does it (never mind eight times a week): "I just get out of the way. That's my job — to get out of the way and let it come through."

It comes through loud and clear. "They stand up for her every night — absolutely!" said one card-carrying journalist and friend-of-the-court — Entertainment Weekly editor at-large Mark Harris, who is Kushner's partner — dispelling the excesses of opening-night ovations. "Her big number always gets really sustained applause. Funny thing is, there aren't many places in the show where you're allowed to applaud so the audience really goes for it."

Yes, she said, Pinkins had suggestions as they went along —but, then, so did everybody. "George runs a very open room. He always says, 'How does it feel? What do you think?' Everybody contributes. I think the piece has an inevitability to it because they invest so deeply. They're asked to be present, as contributors, and that creates this great excitement in the room. You have to know how to handle it, and he does that very, very well."

The prestige of the piece brought out a full firmament of stars and celebrities. The composer's side of the room was Millie-silly with producer Hal Luftig, lyricist Dick Scanlan and the current title holder, Susan Egan. The latter arrived late, slurping a soda from a paper cup. "I got out of my show 40 minutes ago so I just shoved a piece of pizza and a soda down me so my stomach won't growl. It's a really glamorous life, isn't it.?"

Same story with Maggie Gyllenhaal, who arrived with a Starbucks cup and Peter Sarsgaard. (The latter flashed his famous, sexy crooked-nonsmile to the photographers.) "I came from work," she explained. "Work" happens to be the other Kushner epic that's going on at the moment: Homebody/Kabul, which will play the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Harvey Theatre May 11-30 with Drama Desk nominated Linda Emond and the entire L.A. cast (among them Reed Birney, Bill Camp, Firdous Bamji and Rita Wolf).

"I went to school with Tony," John C. McGinley said a bit sheepishly by way of justifying his presence at the theatre. "We ate, slept and drank together for three years down at NYU." Was Kushner writing then? "Nonstop." McGinley is also catching some theatre and getting those juices going again. "I saw my friend Ray Liotta's play [Match] last night. I saw Josh Charles in Neil LaBute's play [The Distance From Here]. I'd love to slide into something as amazing as the two pieces I saw those guys do. I'd like to come back to the stage. Maybe when I get my next six-month hiatus from [NBC's] 'Scrubs.'"

Also in Kushner's camp was the primal pair of the evening: newscaster Diane Sawyer, who'd not seen the show before, and her husband, Mike Nichols, who embraced the playwright warmly at intermission. It was Nichols who turned Kushner's Pulitzer Prize-winning Angels in America into a Golden Globe winning epic.

One of those Golden Globed was the lone carryover from the play (and a Tony winner for it), Jeffrey Wright. He flashed thumbs up for the Broadway Caroline: "There's always a question of whether a show will survive in the transfer from Off-Broadway to Broadway, and this show has been served by that transfer in a way that I rarely see. It has become, in the new expansiveness of it, more intimate and available in a way that's really exciting."

He saw no immediate stage project on the horizon but said he has a couple of pictures coming out. The first is Jonathan Demme's remake of "The Manchurian Candidate," updated to the Persian Gulf War and starring Denzel Washington, Liev Schreiber and Meryl Streep (in roles originated by Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Angela Lansbury). Continued...