By Harry Haun
21 Jan 2005

Sally Murphy, who plays Tzeitel, the first Teyve's brood to make it down the aisle, has a stage history of traumatized young maidenhood (Carousel, The Grapes of Wrath, The Wild Party), so it's not surprising that Cossacks show up here on her wedding day. But some professional relief is on the way for the actress: Feb 10-13, she'll star as the Brooklyn mother in the "Encores!" version of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, with Candide's Jason Danieley as her drunken hubby and Noises Off's Katie Finneran as her tartish sis.

John Cariani continues his caffeinated, Tony-nominated performance of Tzeitel's groom, Motel the tailor— a comic portrayal that has grown so much in tics and twitches in a year that it seems to have crossed over into the insect kingdom. Oddly, in the one scene where his character would be nervous, he's not. When asked why this is, Cariani advanced a wonderful one-word answer that heads off any further inquiry: "Grace."

Fully recovered from an unscheduled trip to the basement she took Nov. 16 right after "Sunrise, Sunset" (via a faulty trap door) is the unsinkable Nancy Opel, now sprightly executing her matchmaking duties as Anatevka's primary obstacle to true love, Yente.

"I fell about 12 feet," she said. "It was far enough for you to have time to think about it on your way down. I kept thinking, 'How have I stepped off the lip of the stage? I think I'm going to be hurt.' She wound up with a broken elbow but rebounded puckishly. "It worked out okay. I missed about six weeks, but it turned out much better than I thought it would. A couple of things protected me, one of which was the costume. Anytime you got a big skirt, it sorta slows you down a little bit, and I was wearing a heavily padded hat."

To the role of Hodel's school-teacher suitor, Perchik, Robert Petkoff brought a Young Vic voice and agile footwork—a surprising combo. He pooh-poohed the latter. "I've got no dancing skills at all. The Russians would take the new steps and go, 'We got it.' And me—it would take three weeks of trying to get it before I'd have the steps down right."

The voice was well rehearsed, he allowed. "When I was in college, I had a small Midwestern voice, and I read Richard Burton's biography. He would go out to hills of Wales and do the Shakespearean monologues full-voiced until he'd go hoarse. He did it over and over until he wouldn't go hoarse. After school, I'd go to this outdoor theatre and do the same thing three times a week till I could finally do them without getting hoarse."

That training he'll put to use April 10 when he and his wife, a striking redheaded actress named Susan Wands, will have a Romeo and Juliet date at Chicago Shakespeare—but not in the expected roles: He will be Mercutio, and she will do Lady Montague.

Also on the marriage front: Stewart F. Lane and wife Bonnie Comley, who are among the producers of Fiddler, have a dizzyingly dense agenda ahead of them: They're preparing for a Seattle production May 30-June 19 of the David Zippel musical, Princesses, casting it with many of the same people they used at Goodspeed, eying Broadway for the fall. A reading of Lane's In the Wings was directed earlier this week by adobe theatre's Jeremy Dobrish. The couple will also put into production a film titled Brooklyn Rules with Alec Baldwin, Freddie Printz Jr. and Mera Suvari. Lastly, and perhaps most interestingly, they plan to produce a movie directed by Dori Bernstein. "The working title is Broadway: The Musical," said Lane. "It is a documentary that covers the entire 2003-2004 Broadway season, from Tony Award to Tony Award.

Among the marrieds in the audience were Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson, who enjoyed the show tremendously ("She cried every two minutes," testified Wallach) and—where have they been keeping themselves?—Michael Tucker and wife Jill Eickenberry. In San Francisco, that's where—raising a family and doing film/TV work, but they're thinking of relocating to New York and doing a play here together. Agent Jeff Berger is on the case.

The ghost of Jerome Robbins, whose original choreography was reproduced for this production, was much felt in the show's still-breathtaking dance scenes—notably, the wedding sequence where men bound about with a bottle of wine sitting on the hats.

"I have dropped it twice—once during the dance and once at the end," dancer Francis Toumbakaris confessed not at all shame-faced. "Actually, Jerome Robbins wanted for his dancers to drop the bottle so audiences would know that it's real and we're not faking it. Actually, I think we should drop them more often. It's just that we are too careful."

The cast gives their opening night curtain call
photo by Aubrey Reuben

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