By Harry Haun
01 Dec 2006

Others attending: Wicked producer David Stone, Avenue Q director Jason Moore, Barry Diller with Diane von Furstenberg, Steve Kroft from "60 Minutes," Kate Bosworth, Denis O'Hare, Joan Rivers, The Post's Michael Riedel (one of the play's first repeat customers), Jennifer Jason Leigh and her writer-director husband Noah Baumbach, Anna Wintour, Zuleikha Robinson, David Bowie (who doesn't brake, or slow down, for photographers), Mimi Lieber, Heather Randall, Jesse Tyler Ferguson (enjoying the holidays here, having hopped a ride back on CBS' coin to sell his series, "The Class," on the Thanksgiving Day parade), Scott Wittman, Bob Crowley, Charlotte St. Martin, and a pack of playwrights: Terrence McNally, Paul Rudnick, Bruce Norris, Jeff Whitty, John Patrick Shanley and Arthur Laurents, the latter with his last (and Mendes') Mama Rose, Bernadette Peters.

Newly relocated John Shea's eyes were practically dancing at the opening-night hoopla. "I've been gone five years, but I'm back in New York now and I want to work in theatre."

Mrs. Sam Mendes created a titanic commotion wherever she went — paparazzi being paparazzi, and she being Kate Winslet — but she did make a concerted effort to play supportive backstage wife. It flew better away from the theatre barricades at the afterparty in the Royalton lobby, where she was free and footloose and fielding quite a few compliments about her work in "Little Children," for which she's being Oscar-touted.

At the party she found enough spouses of the key creatives to form a bridge team: Bart Freudenlick, Moore's filmmaker husband who directed her "Trust the Man" flick; Nicole Farhi, wife of the playwright; and that marvelous actress who's not too quick to wed, Diana Quick, Nighy's nonbride from "Brideshead Revisited" for nigh onto 2.5 decades.

Lauren Bacall was star bauble of the evening and insisted on being seated next to Nighy. "I adore Bill," she huskily declared. "Never worked with him, unfortunately. I hope I do one day. He's a marvelous actor. I've seen him a lot in England in the theatre."

By the time the BBC News windbag had finished with Hare and Mendes, both were pleading vocal rest — the divas! — but caved to special pleading from selected press.

Why The Vertical Hour? Mendes was asked. "I just wanted to do a new play. I wanted to do something that wasn't a revival, that was contemporary, that was about the world we are living in now. I thought it was a wonderful play, it had wonderful parts, and it was a very delicate, beautiful and gentle love story in the midst of this debate about politics. And I think it's exciting to have a thousand people a night listening to a play about now."

He said he acquired his star in a very unglamorous way. "Our children go to the same day school down on 14th Street, and I bumped into her at school and said, 'Will you talk to me about this?' She said, 'I'm not free until the spring.' That's how it happened. You imagine all those glamorous people meeting in bars or pubs, but this deal was done at 8:30 in the morning on a wet Wednesday last January."

Nighy came from Hare's camp, and Mendes couldn't be more pleased. "It's amazing to meet someone like Bill, who has absolutely no cynicism at all about the profession — about the world, really. He's an innocent. He's a most delightful man, really. There's no bitchery. There's nothing malicious about him at all. And to watch someone whom I saw emerge as a major movie star in his mid-50s is a wonderful thing. Why would Judi Dench emerge a major movie star in her mid-50s — and Ian McKellen? You're watching it happen in front of your eyes. When it happens to them in their 50s, they really f--king earned it."

Nighy arrived looking as attractively disheveled in person as he did on stage. No difference. Nada. "It's a helluvah night," he moaned and groaned. "It's been a big week. I've never worked in New York before and never opened a play on Broadway, and I do think it's kinda different here where you have these three press nights and then an opening night with no critics, whereas we just have one night of terror and you're over."

Long-stemmed and loose-limbered, Nighy is a perpetually moving maze of in-the-moment mannerisms, most of them mined from Hare it seems. "Well, we've been together a long time, David and I," the actor allowed. "He was giving me leading roles when no one else was giving me leading roles, and he gave me breaks nobody else was going to give me. He put me on the National Theatre stage in England in a leading role. He gave me leading roles on film, and I admire his work as much as I admire anybody's. I love delivering his jokes. He writes world-class jokes. He just writes very beautifully, and, if you speak it properly, it just is the most beautiful writing. I think he is a very great writer and a very important man."

And, speaking of distant Hare echoes, has anyone noted that he is partial to auburn-haired heroines — Moore here and Blair Brown in The Secret Rapture. Does his vision come complete with hair color?

Moore's movie-star training betrayed none of the Broadway baptism-by-fire she had just been through, but she was quick to echo Nighy's sentiments: "This last week has been kinda stressful, as I'm sure you understand — press week and opening night and all of that — and the pressure has been really enormous. But we've had an incredibly supportive group of people. I mean, all the actors —we're really good friends, and Sam and David — it was a great feeling of support."

She racked up a couple of Caryl Churchill plays down at The Public years ago — Ice Cream With Hot Fudge and Serious Money —and did Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street in an about-to-be-demolished movie house, but those are distant memories for her now, almost a new discipline. "It's tough because you started it an eight o'clock, and it continues for the next two hours. And, if you miss a step emotionally, you don't get that step back. It's like everything that he writes builds on something else. It's not like you can fake it so there is an urgency, I think, in making sure that you're really inhabiting each moment."

Fortunately, she plays a character she loves. "She moves me because she is completely an idealist. At the end of the day, I think what David has written is so incredibly moving."