By Harry Haun This particular play is a reflection of a private passion the way Master Class and The Lisbon Traviata mirrored his love of opera and the Nathan Lane roles in Love! Valour! Compassion! and Lips Together, Teeth Apart betray a Broadway show-tunes bent.
"I don't play tennis anymore," he admitted. "Since my surgery — I'm a lung-cancer survivor — that's one of the things that [had to] go. I don't have the stamina, but I love watching it."
Come mid-July, he will get down to cases with the musical book for Catch Me If You Can, the great-impostor movie that Steven Spielberg made with Leonardo DiCaprio five years ago. (Its director, Coast of Utopia's Jack O'Brien, and its lyricist, Hairspray's Scott Wittman, were among McNally's opening-night well-wishers.) He just finished his next straight play, Unusual Acts of Devotion, which will star Kathy Bates, the first Frankie in his Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune.
Produced by his life partner, Tom Kirdahy, it will premiere in the upcoming season at the Philadelphia Theatre Company, from whence cometh his most recent Second Stage opus, Some Men.
07 May 2007
The Curtains cast made a photo-op spectacle of themselves by arriving in one big star-cluster: David Hyde Pierce, Debra Monk, Jason Danieley and Edward Hibbert.
The latter presented Lansbury with a very special opening-night gift: a photo of his father (Geoffrey Hibbert) and her mother (Moyna MacGill) as Lord and Lady Brockhurst in the original 1954 production of The Boy Friend that brought Julie Andrews to Broadway.
Contributing to the block-party ambiance, Charlotte d'Amboise had a helluvah commute, crossing the street from A Chorus Line at the Schoenfeld, escorted by the husband she found in the trash cans of Cats, Terrence Mann, now a silver-haired "senior Cat." He relayed that he just finished a series for the sci-fi channel called "The Dresden Files."
Ashley Brown, strolling over with co-star Gavin Lee and his wife Emily from the New Amsterdam's Mary Poppins, pronounced the play "practically perfect in every way."
Nathan Lane greeted Harriet Harris with a kiss at the theatre and talked endlessly with her at Sardi's scenic second-floor bar — a lot of catching-up to do, apparently. She was Maggie Cutler to his Sheridan Whiteside in Broadway's last Man Who Came to Dinner at Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre, and now she's back in town —bound for the same theatre June 28 — co-starring with Margaret Colin in John Van Druten's classic cat-fight, Old Acquaintance. Needless to add, she found the stellar friction in Deuce highly instructive — "and I'm still learning new things from my old acting teacher, Marian."
Another Seldes supporter was Karen Akers, the statuesque chanteuse who's now giving composer Jule Styne a splendid salute at the Algonquin. "We've never worked together," Akers admitted, "but we hope to do Three Tall Women some day." (As well they should.)
Also in Seldes camp was Victor Garber, who's spending his TV hiatus now in Noel Coward's Present Laughter for director Nicholas Martin at Boston's Huntington Theatre. Garber did a year at the Music Box with Seldes in Ira Levin's Deathtrap. She did all of that show's 1,793 performances and made the Guinness Book of Records.
Deathtrap stage manager Lani Sundsten made the opening with hubby Manny Azenberg.
The fans who came the farthest for this premiere: Millicent Martin ("Angela's a great friend out in Los Angeles. I came to support her. I came for a week to visit Elaine Orbach, who came with me tonight.") Also, Christopher MacDonald interrupted his moviemaking with Diane Keaton in Baton Rouge to make the trek north ("I'm a friend of Michael Mulheren and a fan of the play. I'd read it, and I wanted to do it, and I was frustrated that I couldn't get the time free long enough to take a meeting on it.").
David Staller and Brian Murray were allowed out of tech to attend the Deuce launch. They have, respectively, the Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten roles in the Irish Rep revival of Patrick Hamilton's old warhorse melodrama, Angel Street, now renamed Gaslight after Ingrid Bergman's Oscar-winning vehicle and set to open there May 17.
It should be remembered that the doxy who did the light dusting in the Boyer-Bergman household was an 18-year-old Angela Lansbury, at the beginning of her 63-year career.
Tennis legend Billie Jean King was Deuce's top card, an unexpected celebrity. Kathryn Grody came with her son (in lieu of her spouse, Mandy Patinkin). Hairspray Tony winner Dick Latessa arrived with Grey Gardens' yet-to-be-Tonyed Mary Louise Wilson. McNally took time for a comforting word to photographer Jill Krementz, Kurt Vonnegut's widow.
There was a first-tier line of journalists attending. In addition to Osborne (who was with his Osborne neighbor, Ellen Kapit, a real-estate broker who got Lansbury her apartment), there was Liz Smith with Cynthia McFadden, The Post's Michael Riedel with Chez Josephine's Jean-Claude Baker and, of course, perennial Postie, Cindy Adams.
Also: Liz Callaway, Tony winner Andrea Martin, playwrights John Guare and Paul Rudnick, producers David Stone and Jeffrey Richards, Joan Copeland, composer Stephen Flaherty (without his wordsmith, Lynn Ahrens, for once), Barbara Cook with Harvey Evans, director Walter Bobbie, Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank, Jamie de Roy, Tovah Feldshuh and Simon Jones.
Jan Maxwell dropped by after a Sunday night performance of the three-hour-long Coram Boy to retrieve her son and husband (Robert Emmet Lunney, who understudies the men roles in Deuce) — and she was still earlier than Donna Murphy, who sailed in late with hubby Sean Elliott. At her LoveMusik opening-night party last week, Murphy showed up two hours after the curtain fell. (Lansbury and Seldes bettered that by a good 90 minutes.)
Lansbury found herself a cozy alcove on the second floor and surrounded herself with family — her two twin brothers (Edgar the theatre producer and Bruce the television producer), son Anthony Shaw, daughter Deirdre and her husband. But she had time for everyone and made periodic forays around the room, flitting among the glad-handers with great English charm, style and proper good manners, a moving picture of graciousness.
She kept this up all evening, without the slightest sign of fatigue. You'd think you were at Mame Dennis' in full party mode. Late in the evening, I asked her which was harder — the party or the performance? She looked me in the eye, smiled the smile of Bethlehem Steel and said, "The party."
