By Andrew Gans
04 Aug 2006
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| Florence Lacey in (top to bottom) Les Misérables, Evita and The Grand Tour (with Joel Grey) |
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| photo by Joan Marcus (Les Miz), Martha Swope (Evita) |
News, views and reviews about the multi-talented women of the musical theatre and the concert/cabaret stage.
FLORENCE LACEY
With Evita once again making headlines — the London revival recently opened to critical hosannas at the Adelphi Theatre — it seems only appropriate that Florence Lacey, the woman who holds the title for longest-running Eva and is also one of the finest singing actresses to play the part, is about to return to the stage.
Lacey, whose Broadway credits also boast Les Misérables, The Grand Tour as well as both the 1978 and 1995 productions of Hello, Dolly!, is set to make her Fringe Festival debut in Trouble in Shameland, which begins its limited engagement at the Actor's Playhouse Aug. 11. Lacey has been cast as Virginia Carlson, mother of Michael Carlson (Brad Standley), in the Bryan Putnam musical. "I'm playing a lot of mothers and grandmothers these days," Lacey says with a laugh, "and it's turning out to be a lot of fun. I'm getting nice things to sing and dramatic roles." In fact, Lacey recently played Carolee Carmello's mother in the world-premiere production of Kathie Lee Gifford's Saving Aimee and portrayed Edgar Allan Poe's mom in the Signature Theatre's acclaimed mounting of Nevermore this past winter.
Lacey explains that her invitation to play Virginia in Trouble in Shameland came via e-mail: "I said, 'Okay, e-mail me the script [and] let's see what it's like.' I read the role, and I thought, 'I have to do this. This is really terrific!' And that was before I even heard the score. The role is just so interesting and intricate."
Shameland — which incorporates puppetry, black-light theatre and video — concerns the aftereffects of a child who accidentally kills himself playing with a gun. "It's about [the older brother] who deals with his survivor guilt . . . by drawing and writing," says Lacey. "He goes into this creative world and creates these characters that he vicariously experiences life through. He's trying to find himself and doing it through art. And [as his mother], I'm also going through a lot of guilt because I didn't secure the gun. It's about a son and a mother's different journeys of guilt and shame, thus Shameland, and 'Shameland' is the [title of the] graphic novel that he is writing."
Putnam also raves about Lacey's singing voice, a magnificently rangy alto that can be amazingly powerful and strikingly beautiful. If you've never had the privilege of hearing Lacey, try and hunt down a copy of her highlights recording of Evita — you'll be astounded by her vocal work as Eva, a role she played thousands of times in the Andrew Lloyd Webber-Tim Rice musical. "I stopped counting after 3,000 [performances]," she says with a big laugh. "It's got to be close to 4,000, I think. Twelve years of my life in that part! It was six years steady, and then six years with hiatuses. I'd go out for three months or six months and then have a little break."
When asked how she was able to maintain her enthusiasm for the role, Lacey says, "All I'd have to do is remind myself that this opportunity was not going to last forever, and that this was definitely my role of a lifetime. . . . I also used to carry around biographies of [Evita] and even tapes of her speaking and lots of photographs. I had trunks that would travel with me — we called them the archives. If anybody wanted to know anything or was in need of any stimulation, all they had to do was come to me, and I'd throw something at them to get them riled up again about Evita."
And what did Lacey think of Alan Parker's "Evita" film? "I loved Antonio Banderas — I thought he was wonderful. I felt bad because I thought Madonna could have done it, but they lowered the keys and it took so much of the passion away. She only had to hit those notes once, [so] I think she could have done it, and it would have had the fire that [it needed]. If you heard tapes of Evita speaking — even though I didn't understand one word of her language — you could understand why the role was written in the range it was. It needed to be that huge range — belting very high — because that's the way she sounded. When she came to her last radio broadcast and her voice was really destroyed, it added to the vulnerability of the character. I think everything not being pushed to its emotional, physical, vocal limit, you lost some of who Evita was and what she was about. . . . I was so excited by the beginning of the movie. It was visually so beautiful, and then it lost me somewhere through it, and I honestly believe it's just because she wasn't reaching the passion. She wasn't getting to the hysteria of whipping these people up into a frenzy of believing in Peron."
As for future projects, Lacey says there's a chance of a European tour of Nevermore, and it looks like she will revisit her role in Saving Aimee when the musical plays the Signature Theatre in April 2007. But, for now, the multitalented actress is focusing on Trouble in Shameland, which she says is "very avant-garde . . . There are all these different realms that we go into through [the main character's imagination]. At one point I even become a dragon right in front [of the audience]."
[Trouble in Shameland will play the Actor's Playhouse, 100 Seventh Avenue South, Aug. 11 at 10 PM, Aug. 13 at 9:30 PM, Aug. 17 at 3 PM, Aug. 24 at 8 PM and Aug. 27 at 2:15 PM. For tickets call (212) 279-4488 or visit www.fringenyc.org.] Continued...
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