PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: The Odd Couple: Mr. Simon Takes His Bow
By Harry Haun
28 Oct 2005
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Nathan Lane; Neil Simon; Matthew Broderick; Joe Mantello; Brad Garrett; Peter Frechette; Rob Bartlett; Sarah Jessica Parker; Martin Short; Kathleen Turner; Jerry Seinfeld.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
A man of many body parts that all seem to act, Nathan Lane had only to hoist his index finger in the air meaningfully Oct. 27 at the Brooks Atkinson to lower the first-nighters' tumultuous curtain-call applause for The Odd Couple.
The meaning was clear: "Oh, yes, there's somebody here you should meet"—and, with that, he went to the back of John Lee Beatty's rambling Upper West Side apartment set, opened the door and ushered forth a bespectacled gentleman who looked like a Watchtower pamphleteer who'd lost his way.
But, being the world's most popular and produced playwright of all time who was crowning this accomplishment with the biggest advance for a straight play in Broadway history (more than $21 million), Neil Simon found his way to center stage, planted himself squarely between his Oscar Madison (Lane) and his Felix Ungar (Matthew Broderick), kissed their foreheads for jobs well done and took a well-deserved bow.
His first, he reckoned later at the elaborate wind-down after-party at one of the Marriott Marquis' massive ballrooms. "I was thinking about it, and I don't think I've ever done that before," he said. "Maybe once. I don't remember." After almost 40 Broadway outings in the past 50 years, one can't remember everything. (His first Broadway adventure, a collection of sketches that lasted 18 days, was called—prophetically—Catch a Star.)
Essentially, that is what he did this Broadway revival of his first Tony-winning play. He caught two stars—formerly The Producers—who were shopping around for a second coming and decided The Odd Couple was the way to go. "I don't think anybody expected such a success," Simon confessed. "We didn't look at it that way. We were just going to do The Odd Couple. Manny Azenberg put the deal together. We didn't know what we were doing. The first week, the sales were enormous. We said, `How did this happen?'"
The entire run recently sold out, and, if the show goes extra innings, that will be the two stars' call. In any event, the next Broadway Simon on the horizon will open in mid-February: a revival of 1963's
Barefoot in the Park, the play he wrote right before
The Odd Couple. It stars
Amanda Peet, Patrick Wilson, Jill Clayburgh and
Tony Roberts.
In the wings, Simon sez, he has three new plays ready: Rewrites (a play rewrite of his last autobiography), something called Waiting for Papa and a sequel to The Sunshine Boys.
The 78-year-old author won't likely be coming back for another curtain-call, and he wanted it known that this one wasn't his idea. "I wasn't going to do it, but they came to me and said, 'We need you to do this for us. You're going on stage,' so I did it."
"They," basically, is Lane. The star readily admits that he's the one who pushed the playwright on stage and has no apologies for this. "I said, 'Is he going to come out?' and they said, 'No.' I said, 'He has to. This is his play. Let's do something. I won't make a big speech. I just want him to come out.'" It was important to him that Simon share the glory.
"I just love the whole play," he admitted. "I've loved it since I was a kid. And tonight I get to do it and open it on Broadway 40 years after it opened, and then to have Neil Simon walk in the door and out onto the stage—it was just a dream come true for me."
Joe Mantello, the show's director, can attest to Lane's devotion to the play. "Nathan has wanted to do this play since he was something like 12 years old," he said. "There was one evening, right before previews, when I went to his dressing room to give him notes, and he was sitting at the dressing room table with a dog-eared falling-apart copy of the play he had gotten from Fireside Theatre when he was a kid. His name was written on it. It said Joe Lane. And he was going over it. It was the most moving thing to me because I know that, before he was Nathan Lane, this play had moved somebody named Joe Lane.
"He really came to the rehearsal ready to play it and make it as good as it possibly can be. He gives you a multitude of choices to pick from. He's truly an inspiration to work with."
Like Simon, Mantello will have another play on the Broadway boards before season's end: a revival of Three Days of Rain which is set to arrive in the spring, starring Julia Roberts. It is, confessed the Tony-winning director of Richard Greenberg's Tony-winning Take Me Out, his favorite Greenberg play.
As he did with last season's revival of Glengarry Glen Ross, Mantello kept The Odd Couple in period, as written. Hence, Simon skipped the whole rehearsal process and started seeing the show—religiously—when it went into previews. The director's major obstacle was the audience's familarity with the turf. Unless you are Terrence McNally, who came to the evening a complete virgin, you could have seen The Odd Couple in a variety of states—the Broadway original (with Art Carney and, in his Tony-winning arrival role, Walter Matthau) or the movie version (with Matthau and Jack Lemmon) or the vastly popular television series (with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall). There was even a distaff Broadway version (with Rita Moreno and Sally Struthers). It tells of two born-again bachelors who turn roommates when their marriages crash and burn—slobby Oscar and fussbudget Felix—and, in three short weeks, repeat all their marital mistakes. Continued...
