The legendary comedy couple Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara recently took in a performance of Kenny Solms’ new play It Must Be Him, currently playing at Off-Broadway’s Peter J. Sharp Theatre.
The show concerns “Louie Wexler, a whiz kid comedy writer from the heyday of variety television, is now down on his luck. With his devoted agent, and his considerably less devoted housekeeper by his side, Louie finds himself broke, lonely, and on the wrong side of middle age. Desperate to rekindle his fading career, save his posh Beverly Hills home and find the man of his dreams, Louie searches high and low for one last shot at his own real-life happy ending.”
The cast features Peter Scolari (of TV’s “Bosom Buddies,” Broadway’s Hairspray, Sly Fox) and Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award nominee Liz Torres, along with Patrick Cummings (Happiness), Tony Award nominee Stephanie D’Abruzzo (Avenue Q), Harris Doran (Love Jerry), Ryan Duncan (Altar Boyz), John Tracey Egan (The Producers), Tony nominee Jonathan Kaplan (Falsettos), Bob Ari (Bells Are Ringing), Tony Award nominee Alice Playten (Henry, Sweet Henry), Edward Staudenmayer (Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me) and Jessica Tyler Wright (Sweeney Todd).
Here is a shot of Stiller and Meara visiting the company after the show:
Tickets, priced at $65, are available via www.ticketcentral.com and at (212) 279-4200, or in person at the box office.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger Stephanie D’Abruzzo, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q. The singing actress, who will be seen in the Off-Broadway premiere of the new comedy with music, It Must Be Him, has blogged for Playbill.com all week; her final entry follows.
GOOD MORNING. So this is farewell. I end my week of blogging a few days before our gang at It Must Be Him are swallowed whole by that creature known as tech.
Maybe it’s a side effect from working on a play about a frustrated writer, or maybe it’s the fact that I’ve never churned out this many pieces in a week before, but I have writer’s block.
I can hear your collective moaning out there. It’s such a cliché, I know, for people to write about how they have writer’s block and to blather on and on about how awful it is to have nothing to say and how maddening it is to be on a deadline with no blood left in their veins. But, at least in my case, it’s true. I remember a line from a John Augustine play that ran in Summer Shorts 2, alongside the piece I was in with Jonathan C. Kaplan, that said something to the effect of: “Clichés exist because they’re true.” It might have been stereotypes, not clichés, but no matter… they’re close cousins. In any case, I’d been saying that for years, about clichés/stereotypes existing because they’re often true. And when a playwright echoes something you’ve felt for a long time, you feel especially validated. So I unapologetically own this horrid, clichéd writer’s block and its resulting spillage onto today’s blog post, and respectfully suggest that you just suck it up.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger Stephanie D’Abruzzo, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q. The singing actress, who will be seen in the Off-Broadway premiere of the new comedy with music, It Must Be Him, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her fourth entry follows.
GOOD MORNING. You do know Orson Welles is dead, right? You do know he can’t actually tweet, right? You do know who he was, right? No?
Sigh.
Yesterday, I made a joke about Orson Welles and Twitter. I thought it was hilarious. So did my husband. I imagined if Twitter had existed in Orson Welles’ day. He’d no doubt tweet nonstop about how horrible that voiceover for frozen peas went! (@CFKane: “Saying ‘IN July’ sucks, IMHO! Ridiculous! Why must my genius suffer these fools?”) Funny, right?
And today I realize that there are probably a lot of people who had no idea whom I was talking about. That’s happening quite a bit here at It Must Be Him.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger Stephanie D’Abruzzo, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q. The singing actress, who will be seen in the Off-Broadway premiere of the new comedy with music, It Must Be Him, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her third entry follows.
GOOD MORNING. I’m a bad, bad girl. (I bet Army Archerd never opened with that line.)
So much guilt. I have been spending my evenings blogging instead of doing my homework for the show. Even though I don’t have a lot to memorize in It Must Be Him, I’m the kind of goody two-shoes actor who likes to make sure she’s prepared and kicks herself when she screws up (well, slaps… literally kicking one’s self requires a certain amount of flexibility). But this week I have been a tad delinquent. Fortunately I have a good deal of downtime in the show and a decent short-term memory, so I can cram a bit during other people’s scenes. Of course, then I wind up missing the chance to watch these fabulous actors work. I freely admit that I can’t help but drop everything when Liz Torres enters. She’s a stealth bomber. She makes me laugh without having to say a single word.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking, “This is Stephanie’s third blog post and she really hasn’t told us a blasted thing about the show she’s supposed to be writing about. There’s just a lot of blah blah about definitions and people and some guy named Army.”
True. I excel in blah blah. But in my defense, it’s hard to share too much about the show without having to explain things that ultimately give the whole plot away. Would you have wanted Orson Welles to blog about how Rosebud was a sled? I didn’t think so. (Oh, but can you imagine if Orson Welles was on Twitter? “Totally psyched for Masson Wine shoot today!” “Merv iz the coolest!” “Dude, I was only kidding about the aliens! Suckas!!”)
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger Stephanie D’Abruzzo, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q. The singing actress, who will be seen in the Off-Broadway premiere of the new comedy with music, It Must Be Him, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her second entry follows.
GOOD MORNING. I am chagrined, as I failed to mention in my last post how happy I am to be in a show. It feels good to be working on a show, and not just because employment is such a handy thing. Even shows with high ratios of blood, sweat and tears are fond to me, because if there are high-quality people involved, so many sins are forgiven.
It’s a wonderful thing, how we come to gather people in our lives. I was reminded of that a week ago, when I walked into the room for the It Must Be Him meet-and-greet and saw this beautiful mosaic of people I already knew and/or loved, and was about to know and/or love.
I worked with director Dan Kutner and lyricist Ryan Cunningham on I Love You Because way back in 2006 and hadn’t seen them in a long time. Now Dan’s a daddy and Ryan’s engaged, and it’s wonderful to see them so happy.
Larry Grossman, our composer, is a fellow Northwestern alum whom I’d met at various NU events, and along with his many other credits he’s well known among my fellow Muppet performers as the music supervisor on “The Muppet Show,” but I’ve never had the chance to work with him before.
We are happy to welcome guest celebrity blogger Stephanie D’Abruzzo, who was nominated for a Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q. The singing actress, who will be seen in the Off-Broadway premiere of the new comedy with music, It Must Be Him, will blog for Playbill.com all week; her first entry follows.
GOOD MORNING. That’s how the late Army Archerd began his regular Daily Variety column for eons. This isn’t Daily Variety, and it’s not really a column, but it is regular, at least for five days. What a great handle that was, Army Archerd. Alliterative, memorable, great syllables… the perfect showbiz name, especially in the gilded Hollywood era when a name like Stephanie D’Abruzzo would be changed by the studios to, oh, I don’t know… Robert Alda. (No relation.)
I’m happy to be here blogging with you good folks out there in Playbill Land, but I must admit that I was a bit hesitant at first about being this week’s Celebrity PlayBlogger. I just don’t like that word “celebrity.” It’s defined as: A famous person. It describes me not at all. And then I saw the synonyms: VIP, personality, star, superstar, famous name, household name, big name. True, my name is long, just not big.
But then I saw the informal synonyms: celeb, someone, somebody. Well hey, everybody is somebody… and I am nothing if not informal, so I can rest easier knowing that you gentle readers are not being totally snowed by the term “celebrity.”
