By Harry Haun
10 Apr 2007
Veteran Elliot Martin is returning to the Broadway-producing with this show, his first since the one-night run of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All in 2003. Of the five Moons that have shined on Broadway, Martin will now have produced three including the last one with Cherry Jones and Gabriel Byrne in 2000 and the definitive one with Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards (an extraordinary revival that eclipsed the original 1957 Moon, which Wendy Hiller and Franchot Tone did for a scant 68 performances).
"Jason was 41 and Colleen was 51 when they did it, but it worked beautifully," he recalled. "She was a real earth-mother. She had no sexuality involved in her performance. She was just a motherly soul probably, that's the closest to O'Neill's image of that character. I liked what Cherry did, and Gabriel played it like a romantic rather than getting to the guts of Jim's terrible angst and memories of his life as an alcoholic. Jason got that, and Kevin understands it totally. Kevin understands addiction. He's amazing."
Martin's life in the theatre began on the other side of the footlights in the chorus of the original Oklahoma! and he met his wife, Marjorie Weston, with that gig. "This was my first job in New York. Four weeks after I arrived in New York, I got the job to go to London in Oklahoma!. I took tap-dance lessons there and understudied Lee Dixon in the Will Parker role. Never went on. The fact I never did probably drove me in producing."
Neil Simon and his wife, Elaine (Sugar) Joyce headed the list of opening-night celebrities in attendance. One of his ex-wives the one for whom he wrote three Oscar-nominated performances was around as well: Marsha Mason. He was there as a charter member of the Kevin Spacey Fan Club (each won a Tony for their 1991 teamwork, "Lost in Yonkers").
"The shoe leather finally broke in," he said, "and the play has settled in." This is the third play in a row he has done here. "I probably won't end up on The Great White Way until I'm with Herself" he gestured to the missus "hanging on to her petticoats." She smiled and said, "We want to work together. We don't know what. We're looking at things though."
Chandler Williams, who did such a sensitive job as the doomed young British soldier in Ireland in the Manhattan Theatre Club Translations that closed a couple of weeks ago at the Biltmore, was accused of checking out his Tony competition (meaning Meaney), and he didn't bother to deny it: "Absolutely. I'm going to get that club she had on stage and take out one of his knees." In truth, he confessed a genuine love of the play. "I only know it from the tape Jason and Colleen did, but I've got it memorized. I love them so much." Spacey has steadfastly refused to see that tape for fear of "artistic thievery" but, as soon as he finishes this engagement, he'll consider caving. "I might eventually see it," he said.
Sharing the same publicist as Spacey got Aaron Eckhart opening-night seats for him and his date, Ashley Wick. Very hot after the success of his sleeper film comedy, "Thank You for Smoking," he just happened to be in town doing publicity for "No Reservations," his new movie with Catherine Zeta-Jones. "We play chefs in the movie so I'm going to do the cooking shows tomorrow Rachael Ray and all that."
Any stage work coming up? "I'm booked all the way into next year, but maybe after that I'd love to come to New York and do a play. In fact, I asked Neil LaBute to write me a play for next year." (Just the man to place his order with: LaBute introduced Eckhart to the world as the archetypal brutish Neil LaBute male in "In the Company of Men.")
Another Spacey bud, Matt Dillon, ducked the stage question. "I'd like to, but there's always the seduction of film," he confessed candidly. "I'm here to support Kevin, and it's always great to see any production of O'Neill for me. I don't care how long it is."
Michael Dansicker, who made his Broadway debut as a musical director on the same show that marked Davies' debut as a director (1981's Piaf with a Tony-winning Jane Lapotaire), has written his own songs for a biography of the late child actor Bobby Driscoll, called Shooting Star (as in syringe). "We're shooting for a long-delayed reading this summer since Twyla Tharp and Bob Dylan are no longer in my life." (He worked on The Times They Are A-Changin' and has the scars to prove it.) "We introduced one of the songs from the show last week at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts' salute to Charles Durning, Anne Bancroft and Gena Rowlands. An actor named Mark Price, who was in All Shook Up and is currently in Mary Poppins, did the show's big number, which is called 'An Actor,' and the response from the audience was just incredible."
Since the next show on Moon producer Ben Sprecher's agenda is Prairie, the musical version of the book and TV series "Little House on the Prairie," he invited to the opening some of the key players who are together for a workshop next week in New York to name Names: Melissa Gilbert, who grew up on the show and now can play the mommy, and Patrick Swayze, switching from "Dirty Dancing" to square dancing. With songs by Rachel Portman and a book by Pulitzer Prize-winning Beth Henley, the show has been developed for the past two years by opera director Francesca Zambello, who'll open a new window in July by world-premiering The Little Mermaid in Denver for Disney.
Haley Joel Osment, a Spacey fan since they filmed "Pay It Forward," came over from NYU where "The Sixth Sense" Oscar nominee majors in drama.
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| The company of A Moon for the Misbegotten takes its opening night bows.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
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