By Harry Haun
13 Jan 2012

	Phillip Boykin
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

The show's most overt villain — Crown, who kills and rapes on stage — is played by Phillip Boykin, a surprisingly jovial figure off-stage. At the curtain call, he did a completely out-of-character curtsy to break up the vigorous boos that greeted him. But don't get him wrong: "I never tire of the boos. It means I did my gig."

He obviously loves the part that goes with the boos, having played Crown in Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Poland and Japan. Does he harbor any hopes of working himself up (or down, depending on your production) to Porgy? "Let's just say that when they lower the keys back down to the original, I'll be ready."

Nathaniel Stampley plays, rather briefly, the Catfish Row denizen named Robbins — an early fatality of Crown's. "I always die in the first act," said the actor who recently played Mufasa in The Lion King. "That seems to be my track." But he's philosophical about it: "The wonderful thing about Robbins is that he sets the whole show going. With that fight and his death, the wheels start turning."

As another of the shantytown folk, Clara, Nikki Renee Daniels sets the sultry tone by lullabying her baby with "Summertime" — a staggeringly tall order, she confessed. "Obviously, it's a lot of pressure to start off the show with anything, let alone with the song that everyone knows and that is the most famous song, arguably, that George Gershwin has ever written. It's a real honor. I take it very seriously.

"I've been actually singing the song since I was about 14. It's one of the first songs when I really started singing seriously. It's a dream come true to do it on Broadway. Honestly, I cried on the phone when my agent told me that I got the show."

Joshua Henry as her husband, Jake, is allowed to snatch a stanza of "Summertime" in this production, although the character usually isn't. "It is, I guess, one of the most recorded songs in history," said Henry, "and one of the most gorgeous songs I've sung so I'm thrilled and honored to be singing it."

The earth mother of the village, Mariah, is played by NaTasha Yvette Williams, who admitted the part wasn't much of a stretch. "It's sorta close to me. I mean, I'm not nosy or meddlesome at all in my own life, but I do sorta have a hand on and around my friends and people I care about. Mariah is able to affect her community, and that's very important to me. I think we do that with this show."

A couple of Caucasians penetrate Catfish Row, briefly riling and irritating the locals — Christopher Innvar, the detective, and Joseph Dellger, the policeman — and neither one of them has been allotted a song, dance or name.

Said Innvar: "I just come in and do my job. I can't complain. It's a beautiful production. I come in and I'm not the nicest guy in the world — so there's that. Still, to be a part of this . . . " Seconded Dellger: "It was such an historic project because it hasn't been done in 35 years on Broadway, and you felt some gravitas with it, y'know — that this was not your average, little, walk-in-the-park musical."

	Nikki Renee Daniels
	photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

The opening-night party was held at the McKittrick Hotel, which is not a hotel but a series of warehouses on West 27th Street put together as party space and — in the case of the site-specific show, Sleep No More — theatre space. First-nighters made their way tentatively through candle-lit corridors of black velvet to party rooms.

Tommy Tune and Matthew Broderick showed up sporting scruffy beards. Broderick said he wasn't growing it for a role and promised to be shaved for his "new Gershwin show" this spring, Nice Work If You Can Get It.

Tune is recovering from shoulder surgery. "It takes a little time. It's desperately fashionable. It's called rotator cuff surgery. Everybody's doing it — but only once."

Judith Jamison was blissfully in attendance and beating the drum loudly for the show's choreographer, Ronald K. Brown. Fresh from his American Songbook triumph, Lin-Manuel Miranda is now focused on Merrily We Roll Along for Encores!

Looking very spiffy indeed, Mario Cantone said he was trying to get a couple of two-character shows on the boards locally. "I just did a two-character play by James Wesley called Art and Science with Len Cariou. We just did a reading for MTC so they're discussing it and they're very interested. The other is called Margaret and Craig, which I did at Vassar at New York Stage and Film last summer." It's about the late drag star Craig Russell, and did you know that Cantone ran the lights for Russell when he was 19 years old?

Also attending: Arlene and Alan Alda, restaurateur Barbara (as in "B.") Smith, Frankie Faison, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Marsha Norman and producer Jeffrey Richards, Race's Richard Thomas, Christine Ebersole, Barbara Cook, director Leigh Silverman, composer Stephen Schwartz, John Cullum, Jefferson Mays, Sierra Boggess and Tam Mutu, Nathan Lane, Lainie Kazan, Gavin Creel, film director Spike Lee, Chinglish playwright David Henry Hwang, director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw, Bill Irwin, Liz Mikel late of Lysistrata Jones, Polly Bergen, Mamie Gummer and Benjamin Walker, Cheyenne Jackson, Laura Osnes and Claybourne Elder and Melissa Van Der Schyff, from the late Bonnie and Clyde gang, "Bonnie and Clyde" Oscar winner Estelle Parsons, Steve Schalchin and Jim Brochu, Piper Perabo, Kerry Butler, producer-actress Tamara Tunie and singer Gregory Generet, La Chanze, director Alex Timbers, New York Observer critic Rex Reed, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert's Will Swenson (Audra's beau), Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Edie Falco.