Christopher Walken will take a vacation from Broadway's James Joyce's The Dead after the April 2 performance and be replaced April 4-23 by Broadway vet Stephen Bogardus, of Falsettos and Love! Valour! Compassion! fame.

Bogardus will be narrator-husband Gabriel Conroy opposite his Off Broadway Falsettoland co-star, Faith Prince, who plays Gretta Conroy in the musical based on the famous Joyce story.

Bogardus' Broadway credits also include High Society, Grapes of Wrath, Les Miserables and West Side Story. He recreated his Love! Valour! Compassion! role in the film version of that Terrence McNally play. Off-Broadway, he is associated with the three William Finn/James Lapine tuners (In Trousers, March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland) that were later boiled down into Broadway's Tony Award-winning Falsettos.

Walken returns to The Dead at the Belasco April 25, presumably with some color in his cheeks.

* Prince plays wife Gretta Conroy in Richard Nelson and Shaun Davey's musical adaptation of the short story by Joyce. In the musical, Gretta's past love of a boy (now dead) is aroused when she sees his likeness in the face of a fellow party guest at a Christmas gathering.

The tuner, embraced as an antidote to brassier pop fare on Broadway, is directed by Nelson and uses poetry fragments, music hall songs and original pieces for its score.

Blair Brown, the original Gretta in the Broadway musical, began to walk among the living again when she left the production March 12. Prince joined the cast March 14. Brown went straight into rehearsals of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, which began previews at the Royale Theatre March 23.