The glitz was given off by the Celebrity Concentrate that showed up at the Royale Theatre, starting with a special Tony Soprano convoy (Aida Turturro, John Ventimiglia, series creator David Chase and a roving HBO camera crew) that showed up in sympathetic support for one of their number who had willingly elected "to buy the farm." The glitter came later at the post-party, courtesy of full twinkle 'n' shine from Tavern on the Green's kilowatt box.

The lineup laid bare in this glare included Tony winners (Sutton Foster, Denis O'Hare, Frank Wood, Jane Krakowski, Williamstown's new artistic director Roger Rees, James Naughton, Andrea Martin), Tony hopefuls (After the Fall's Carla Gugino, Little Women's Megan McGinnis, the once and future Elvis of All Shook Up, Cheyenne Jackson), Oscar winner Timothy Hutton and various degrees of working actors (Barbara Barrie, Bobby Cannavale, Sheri Rene Scott, Wonderful Town's wonderful Brooke Shields, The Rivals' Keira Naughton, Annabella Sciorra, Fat Pig's Ashlie Atkinson, Democracy's Michael Cumpsty, White Chocolate's Lynn Whitfield, Charles Busch, Claudia Shear and the original Mother of 'night, Mother, Anne Pitoniak).

But the true star power of the evening was saved for the stage and shared by a pair of superb actresses, Edie Falco (a.k.a. "Carmela Soprano") and Brenda Blethyn, who work an intricate, powerful two-hander in perfect sync. Marsha Norman's Tony contending Pulitzer Prize winner of 1983 has, as plays go, a hell of an arc: It begins with Thelma Cates (Blethyn), the woman of the house, lamenting the lack of "Snowball" cookies in the cupboard and ends 90 minutes later with her lamenting the loss of a daughter, Jessie (Falco), the workhorse of the house, who, in the interim, has with calm resolve explained why she is considering suicide when her own particular rainbow is not nearly enuf. There is nothing the mother can do or say to stop the tragedy — though, heartbreakingly, she tries.

If you have tears to shed, let 'er rip! Two knowing craftsmen on stage tell you when. Indeed, the Tavern to-do was slow getting started because of major mascara repair after.

"My job is just to play the part as honestly as I possibly can — without patronization, without pity, without self indulgence — just to climb into her skin for an hour and a half."

The performance is Blethyn's first on Broadway. Her only stage appearance in New York was Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club in a 1991 production of Alan Ayckbourn's Absent Friends, and she almost got back for the recent Talking Heads at the Minetta Lane. "I know it's a privilege for me to be here, and I'm very lucky it happened to me."

She's a little hard-pressed to explain how she actually wound up here, though. "For some reason known only to her, Marsha thought of me a long time ago to play this role. I didn't know the play at all. Then it was sent to me a couple of years ago by [director] Michael Mayer, who had seen me in a play in London [Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession]. It just seemed a bit of a pipe dream, and then when I heard that Edie was interested in playing it, we suddenly started saying, 'Oh, let's make this work. This can happen.' And here it is."

Blethyn's big post-play thrill of the evening — "awesome," she called it — was meeting her predecessor in the part, 82 year-old Pitoniak, who, like her original co-star Kathy Bates, vied for 1983's Best Actress Tony Award (Foxfire's Jessica Tandy waltzed off with it).

The evening was, of course, very deja vu for Pitoniak. "I saw how different the two actresses tonight were from Kathy and me," she said, "but that only took a couple of minutes, and then I got right into it. I thought they were terrific. They grew beautifully."

She recalled her first exposure to the play, which was a reading of the unfinished script, but minus the last 15 anguishing minutes. "Marsha had written up to the point where the daughter says, 'I have a box of things for you, Mama.' Kathy and I went over to her apartment on West 72nd, and there were Kleenex boxes around, and we read up to that point. You didn't know how it was going to end. We didn't know. Whether she knew what she was going to do after that, I don't remember. But the rest of it worked okay, then she went on and finished the play."

That was 21 years ago, and the play has in the interim shifted in its emotional weights and meanings — or maybe we just have, like that famous old Mark Twain quote: "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished by how much he'd learned in seven years."

"Absolutely," concurred author Norman, who was seated with one of her playwriting students at Juilliard, Noah Haidle, whom she crowed proudly "has a show at Roundabout next season." "The setting for 'night, Mother is still 'Tonight,'" she said, but minimal tweaking brought it up to speed (random references to North Korea, decaf and cordless phones), but she thinks one can see (or, more precisely, feel) a completely different play.

"When you see it 21 years later, the world has changed," she said. "It really feels as if the play has turned itself around and come at it from the other angle. I see it from Mama's point of view now, not Jessie. You see it from a world that's quite comfortable talking about this sort of thing. When 'night, Mother came out, nobody said suicide out loud." Continued...