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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Old Acquaintance Friend and Fiend
By Harry Haun
29 Jun 2007
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From Top-Margaret Colin and Harriet Harris; Stephen Bogardus, Diane Davis and Michael Wilson; Gordana Rashovich and Cynthia Barlow; Diane Davis and Corey Stoll; Joan Copeland; Paul Rudnick; Nathan Lane; Joyce Chittick and Kathleen Marshall; Audra McDonald
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | When the curtain rose on the 2007-2008 Broadway season June 28 at the American Airlines Theatre, it rose on a pair of lovers nuzzled sleepily on a window bench under an elegant skyline in a Washington Square apartment where the walls climb with books and
paintings. One of the bookshelves turns, in a moment of quick chic, into a liquor cabinet.
The impulse to applaud Alexander Dodge's meticulously appointed set is overpowering,
just as it is in the second act when he moves uptown to a palatial pad on Park Avenue,
which has pink walls with matching birdcage-cover and a staircase for grand entrances.
You're in a world that all but Roundabout's Todd Haimes forgot the old-fashioned Play-Play: specifically, John van Druten's Old Acquaintance. By any other name, it could
be Cats, being a title bout between two lady authors, pals since childhood, who exchange
three rounds er, acts of friendly fire and 67-year-old sophistication that still has snap.
In all of its incarnations, this close-quarters head-butting has been quite a workout for
resourceful, redoubtable actresses: Jane Cowl and Peggy Wood in the 1940 Broadway
original, Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins in the 1943 movie version, Jacqueline Bisset
and Candice Bergen in the 1981 film remake ("Rich and Famous," George Cukor's last
opus) and, now, in its first Broadway revival, Margaret Colin and Harriet Harris.
Colin is the sensible, centered one, Katherine Markham Kit a prestigious but
parsimonious scribe and scholar who specializes in critical successes (and damn few of
those); Harris is the cranky, conniving one, Mildred Watson Drake Milly a prolific and profitable hack whose output brings her all that money can buy (and it's still not enough).
Hence, Milly is constantly stirring the cauldron and testing the friendship, but Kit stays
inordinately grounded and above it all, never giving way to well-earned exasperation.
Complicating matters further: Milly's ex (Stephen Bogardus) and daughter (Diane
Davis) flee to Kit's camp, a comparatively safe and sane harbor. Countering those border
crossings, Kit's loses her fiancι (Corey Stoll) to Milly's daughter. After two overlapping
triangles sweep through their relationship, the authors are left with their own best friends.
That's the way they plotted plays back then. Another sign of the times: both writers are
well off enough to afford maids. (Gordana Rashovich for Kit and Cynthia Darlow for
Milly also come in handy understudying their respective mistresses-of-the-house.)
The opening-night party was held on the ninth floor of the Marriott Marquis Hotel, and
first-nighters were greeted at the door with their choice of drink: Sweet Kit ("Hangar
Mandarin Kiss Vodka, Izze Clementine, Sugar Rim, Cherry Garnish") or Sour Milly
("Hangar Kaffir Lime Vodka, Izze Grapefruit, Lemon Garnish"). The Kit was tres
sweet, but the Milly seemed like it could get you thoroughly undone in nothing flat.
Harris waved away the Sour Milly, being a working actress with a show to do tomorrow.
She works overtime, too like a dog with a rag, extracting the laughs from petty Milly.
"It's a fun part to do," she admitted, "and it was a great house tonight. Margaret and I, at the end of Act I, went: 'Okay. That's how it's supposed to go. This is how we play it.'
"People, actually, rarely write a show like this anymore. I've had some friends come to
the show who are writers, and they say, 'Oh, my gosh, there're like 15 minutes of
fights' van Druten's laying pipes so, by the time characters start coming on and their problems are revealed, you have so much backstory. I think it's a well-written play."
Harris takes the role as if it were a stick-shift, playing broadly when the situation calls for it and then bringing it down to nuance level and human size. "By the time you're getting
laughs with little things, a turn of the head or whatever, the audience is with you, and they
understand your makeup. They're not having to fill in the blanks. They understand these
things. I think that van Druten really gave those two characters a lot of background."
This is not the first time Harris has done a play that Bette Davis did on film. She did
Davis' role in The Man Who Came to Dinner, Maggie Cutler, secretary and confidante to
Nathan Lane's Sheridan Whiteside. Lane was in the front-rank of first-nighters and sat next to her at the party. "Nathan is a very sweet and supportive guy," she said.
Although Davis played the Colin role in the movie edition, she initially opted for the
flashier part of Milly and would have played it if Norma Shearer could have been lured out of retirement to play Kit. When she couldn't, Davis chose nobility over flash.
Colin is a very anchoring presence on stage, allowing Harris to fly as high as she can. "Since it's a period piece, you have to let it take its own exploration to make it relevant,"
she noted. "The play has so many issues that are just very near and dear to my heart: patterning yourself as a role model when you're not really a role model, having your heart
broken by a lover who doesn't want you anymore, reinvesting in that friendship. It was fun to rehearse it for the values that are there and then kick it up for the comedy."
She owned up to a little nipping-and-tucking on the text. "Some smart cuts were made, but
it was mostly about behaving like real people on stage and responding in a real way." Continued...
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