PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Is He Dead? Twain, Pretty in Pink
By Harry Haun
10 Dec 2007
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Norbert Leo Butz; Bridget Regan and Jenn Gambatese; Michael Blakemore; Michael McGrath; David Ives; Marylouise Burke and Patricia Conolly; David Pittu; Jeremy Bobb; Tom Alan Robbins; John McMartin; Chase Mishkin and Daryl Roth; Simon Jones.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
"Is he dead?" I heard somebody say after my fifth Broadway opening in eight days. They were not referring to an exhausted me, but to the title of attraction No. 5, which plopped down Dec. 9 at the Lyceum.
Is He Dead? is the "new" Mark Twain play, which rose phoenix-like to Broadway from more than a century of dust-gathering neglect in the archives. That it had to wait an extra 19 days before the stagehands strike would let the show go on was a bitter pill.
The Twain had put a strain of Bob Boyett's moneybags, forcing the producer for the
second time in one week to parade his players before the press in the lower lobby of the
scene of their crime. Then, like The Seafarer Six, cast joined crew, family and a few friends for a private bash (The Twain team got a sit-down dinner at Tavern on the Green).
Just making it to the finish-line was something to celebrate. Of all the new plays stopped
at the Broadway starting gate by the strike, Is He Dead? is the only comedy and an infrequently done farce kind of comedy at that, requiring needlepoint timing and practice-practice-practice. Twain wrote it two years before the turn of the last century,
and David Ives adapted it seven years into this century. Worlds of comic style and taste lurked betwixt and between and had to be dealt with for New Millennium audiences. And then you factor in the fact the show is opening with little-to-no advance and relying on the kindness of strange critics whose bail-out bouquets have kept The Seafarer buoyant.
Maybe because of these obstacles, the cast arrived for their Sunday matinee opening in a metaphorical clown-car ready for broad-stroked action and piled out of it with highly individualized comic personas. Leading this high-energy assault was Norbert Leo Butz, playing an impoverished Impressionist artist who discovers he can make more
money posthumously, prompting him to fake his own death and assume the identity of his
widowed sister. There's a funny transformation rip-off of Fredric March's Jekyll-&-Hyde
quick-change where, with a few swirls of a quill, he gradually starts to enjoy being a girl.
The artist Butz played was a genuine article, Jean-Francois Millet (1814-1872), who came
to fame, acclaim and wealth only after he had died. Twain's farce let him have all that
during his lifetime by pretending he had died and cross-dressing him like Charley's Aunt,
that old drag war-horse which had charged into theatre existence some six years before.
Butz credited his director, Michael Blakemore, for steering him through the treacherous
waters of female impersonation which, it has to be said, comes in big waves and small.
"Michael is a genius at that specific kind of comedy," Butz contended. "In this sort of
sleight-of-hand variety-show, he can actually do some magic tricks. He knows how to do
'reveals and conceals,' so he was a big help in that. I love Michael Blakemore because he
comes from a time when a theatre actor actually had to have real skills. You had to be
able to do comedy, you had to sing a little, you had to dance a little, you had to be able to
do tricks that whole vaudevillian kind of aesthetic that he admires. We're having a ball.
"And he has come up with just the most wonderful cast. You are out there with people
who are beyond pros. They're thoroughbreds. You toss the ball to somebody, and you
know they're going to pick it right up because everyone's instincts are so impeccable."
There was certainly a united front of fun at the opening entrance laughs and exit
applause throughout for all hands. At the curtain call, their peerless leader, Blakemore, and the co-author in attendance, Ives, were pulled out of the audience and onto the
stage an act that never happened to either before, but they went with the adrenaline flow.
"Usually," said David Pittu, multi-cast for some maximum cutting-up, "opening-night performances are subdued and soggy and not what you want them to be and I felt we had an evening like that a few days ago but I did not feel that way today. It was a real party."
"Today," sighed Marylouise Burke, raising those stakes a tad, "was magical." And her playing-partner, Patricia Conolly, couldn't agree more: "Oh, today can't be surpassed
somehow. I don't see how it can. Our opening was everything an actor would wish for."
John McMartin, who has Burke and Conolly on
his arms in the play, duly noted how well the laughs landed. "It seemed they were all friends out there. I haven't been in a show like this for so long where they laugh all the way through."
And by "they," he didn't mean the actors. "We did all our laughing in the rehearsals.
Now, we're just glad we get the response. That's the ingredient for a farce, obviously the audience so we ride along on them. I've seen a lot of these actors doing other roles, but, when you get in a farce, you find the greater juices get going and people do outrageous things. It has been a grand experience at farce. Michael's superb at this kind of farce."
Having made it out of the jungles of Elvisland (All Shook Up) and Tarzan and onto a
plateau of rarefied farce, Jenn Gambatese was pretty close to seventh heaven in the
heroine slot: "I'm loving every minute of it. I'm loving the cast I'm working with. I loved
the rehearsal process, working with Michael Blakemore. And, especially, I love getting
out there with Norbert and getting to play like that, back and forth. Really, it's great fun.
"It has been like a master's class for me," she continued. "These are actors whom I've
admired for a long time who are so exceptionally good at what they do, and I'm with them, and I get to watch them every night. It's educational for me in a lot of ways."
Plus, she's the only female in the cast who is spared facial hair. Bridget Regan is less
lucky, playing her sister who turns mustache-twirling sleuth to sniff out the identity fraud
going on in the play: "When I was first reading the script after I had been cast, I was
reading my first scene as the inspector with Norbert. This is hysterical. It's a man and a
woman, and both of them are in drag, which is insane. Who'd think of this stuff? You
have got to appreciate the love of drag in this show. It practically qualifies as a theme."
Fresh out of North Carolina School of the Arts (Mary-Louise Parker Country), Regan is
making her Broadway debut here as is (albeit, with an asterisk) Jeremy Bobb, who
explained, "I was understudying in Translations, and then I replaced somebody at the end
of that run so I guess my 'debut' was there, but this is the first time I've originated a role
on Broadway. Either way, it's a dream come true for me. To jump in and be among this
group is amazing. It's an ensemble that, in my opinion, is unmatched anywhere."
Hair and wig designer Paul Huntley contributed mightily to characterizations in the play,
as usual providing plenty of cascading ringlets for Butz to pull at and gnaw on,
underlining Byron Jennings' Oil-Can Harry-type villainy with a face framed in pointy black hair but Huntley didn't do the interviews in the Lyceum's lower lobby. The last time he was there was to get an honorary Tony for lifetime achievement in hair design. Continued...
