By Harry Haun
24 Jan 2005

It is not, kindly note, her first time at the rodeo. "It's just my first time to produce this visably, and it's certainly my first time to produce on Broadway. I started producing close to 15 years ago—while I was still doing Gypsy—doing some small Off-Broadway shows with Eric Krebs. Then I formed my own company, Better World Productions."

Little Women was supposed to be Knee's second Broadway show this season, but the funding for his nonmusical Syncopation fell through at the last moment. Now, he said, the project is twittering to life again. "Hartford Stage wants to do it now in the fall or spring—I'm hope they're going for the fall—with as many people who were going to be in the New York production as we can get. We going to call Neve Campbell to see if she'd still be interested and, hopefully, Michael Hayden, and possibly John O'Connell, who did Strictly Ballroom, as a choreographer. John Tillinger directing, and so on."

The most pressing question Knee leaves unanswered in Little Women is "Where's Poppa?" but that's why God created poetic license. "He does come back from the Civil War in the novel, but, in truth and reality, the father came back and left immediately to be come an itinerant preacher. He's a shadowy figure in the book. In real life, Bronson Alcott was a total idealist who constantly lost his money and was in a state of poverty. He used to go out on the road, and he'd come back with ten cents in his pocket. All the girls would greet him at the door, stop for a second when they realized he'd made no money and then give him a hug. There was an article on him in The New Yorker recently."

A pretty young thing seen in The Boy From Oz arrived at Tavern on the arm of Dracula/Scarlet Pimpernel composer Frank Wildhorn, who was asked what movie he was working on—meaning what movie is he musicalizing now—but gave a straighter than expected answer: Jekyll & Hyde: The Movie, to be produced by Richard Zanuck.

"My next musical," he added, shifting gears and careers back to the stage, "is Scott & Zelda," the well-known sad story of the Fitzgeralds which somehow has escaped Hollywood's focus so far. "It opens July 16 in Marlton, NJ. It's our first big dance show."

Wildhorn smiled, ducked and ran when asked if he (like six other different composers) was planning a musical on Bonnie & Clyde. Hunter Foster, Sutton's brother, is one.

Donna Murphy and husband Sean Elliott, both friends of director Schulman, arrived from filmmaking in different parts of world—he from Santa Domingo where he shot The Feast of the Goat with Isabella Rossellini and Eileen Atkins; she from Montreal where she co-starred with her recent professional neighbor on 45th Street, Hugh Jackman, and Ellen Burstyn in the Darren (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) Aronson film, The Fountain.

Stage-wise, Murphy plans to ease herself back into the saddle this year with "some concert work, hopefully a cabaret thing and a lot of Stephen Sondheim tributes this spring." (Sondheim turns 75 on March 22.) Elliott said there's "talk of a L.A. production of Senor Discretion Himself, then rolling it into New York after that." (This was the posthumous Frank Loesser musical he starred in last summer at D.C.'s Arena Stage.)

Marc Kudisch, for some unknown reason, made a mad dash through the press area and announced, cameras turning, that he was "the lost sister." Then he altered his story and professed to have played The Angel of Death, who'd "just followed Beth around a lot wherever she went." In reality, he's readying to start Chitty Chitty Bang Bang rehearsals in two weeks (he's the villainous Baron). Until then, he will be very much the man around the house, the house being the weekend retreat he and his girlfriend, Shannon Lewis (Ursula in the upcoming Sweet Charity), got about an hour outside of the city. Jim Dale, the Tony-winning Barnum and producer Miskin's escort for the evening, said that what he was working on at the moment was "training a Doberman puppy called Georgy Girl, which I just acquired. She is a hound from Hell. She is now tearing up my apartment. Everything goes in her mouth. Luckily, it comes out the other end, which includes a half dozen one-cent coins. I don't know where she got them. My career is on hold till I've trained this dog to differentiate between what's good for her and what isn't."

Among other marrieds at the theatre and Tavern were Julie Halston and radio's Ralph Howard; she just walked across 52nd Street from her Hairspray matinee to pay a neighborly opening-night visit to Little Women. Also, actors Ron and Lynn Cohen. She has done tons of theatre work but seems to be forever doomed to be identified "Magda," Cynthia Nixon's maid on "Sex and the City." She was not the only Lynn Cohen in attendance: Lynne Cohen, one of the reeds in the Little Women orchestra, showed up with her husband, Constantine Kitsopoulos, who conducted La Boheme on Broadway. And Sweet Charity arranger Michael Rafter was present with wife Jeanine Tesori, who composed Caroline, Or Change and Foster's Thoroughly Modern Millie.

Other opening-night guests included Tony winner Ruben Santiago Hudson (with son), who will skip Tuesday and Wednesday performances of Gem of the Ocean to accompany his HBO film, Lackawana Blues, to Sundance; Richard Kind of The Producers; Julia Murney, who has one more week of Arrangements ay the Atlantic before her Feb. 7 date at Birdland and Feb. 14 rehearsal start for Lennon; Jim Caruso, who booked her for Birdland "Cast Party" as well as Christine Ebersole; Dessa Rose-bound Rachel York; Broadway on Ice skater Oksana Baiul; "Guiding Light" villains Crystal Hunt and Tom Pelphrey; radio's Micky Dolenz, who inherited the Aida villain from Hickok; Zoe Caldwell and sons, Charlie Whitehead (now with New York Stage and Theatre) and Sam Whitehead (a splendid erstwhile critic of theatre for Time-Out, who zroomed off into another direction and now writes/edits for a motorcycle magazine); Saturday Night Fever's Orfeh; Tony-nominated Tovah Feldshuh, who'll open Golda's Balcony Feb. 2 in Los Angeles; Bethany Joy Lenz of TV's "One Tree Hill"; and Matthew Morrison, once of Hairspray.

Not all the celebrities made it to the Tavern bash. Quick to check out was Rosie O'Donnell and Kelli Carpenter. "We're not too much partygoers," Carpenter explained at intermission in the Virginia lobby, which was made pretty frosty by the parade of smokers going out and coming back from the street. "We have to get up early because we have a house full of kids—four, from nine to two. But we've been trapped in the house for two days by the snow so we were happy to get out of the house and come in from Nyack."

Also calling it an early evening was Marian Seldes because she had to host the Theatre Hall of Fame for producer Terry Hodge Taylor the next day. I told her I had recently run into someone who was writing a play for her. "Who's writing a play for me, my darling?' she inquired with an actressy restraint. I told her Tina Howe, who has done well with Seldes before (Painting Churches). "I'm all ready," Seldes declared. "I don't care what she writes. I think she is so wonderful. She mentioned this to me, and I was hoping you were going to say Tina. I get a lot of plays in the mail that say they're written for me, and I turn to the first page, and the first page says, 'A nursing home.'" Not for you, my darling, not for you.