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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Mary Stuart Two Crowns and Twelve Suits
By Harry Haun
20 Apr 2009
Most first-nighters were ready to concede a couple of Best Actress nominations to McTeer and Walter this, mind you, in a season brimful of brilliant competition and the buzz was that award-consideration could easily spill onto the suits (in particular: the two born-Texans who convince you they have a place in Elizabeth I's court Plano's John Benjamin Hickey and San Antonio's Robert Stanton "and Brian Murray," as the venerable vet is smartly billed on the Playbill title page.)
Murray plays the Earl of Shrewsbury, a voice of reason and compassion among the queen's advisors, and the unlikely hero who foils an assassination attempt on her.
"I liked Shrewsbury when I read the play because he doesn't have any political agenda he has a personal agenda, and that's always nice," declared Murray. "The research I did is based on his relationship with Mary. He looked after her and fell in love with her a good 15 years. It's only touched on in this version. There's a play about Shrewsbury and Mary people will want to go there, but that's not what this play's about. He was also a secret Catholic, which the play doesn't talk about.
"Where I think the play connects quite amusingly and brilliantly with what really happened was in the area of Elizabeth's wishy-washiness. She refused to have anything to do with it. She was a great kind of evader, and she said, 'I don't want to be connected with whatever's happening so I'm not going to do anything about it.' But I think that what the play touches on very brilliantly is her refusal to commit."
The "little man" who plays the price for his queen's inability to participate actively in her cousin's execution was Sir William Davison, a new man at court and inconsequential paper-pusher whom Elizabeth entrusted with her signed death warrant for Mary. The queen's attitude was "do with it what you will." When he pleaded for clarification a misjudged nuance could be catastrophic, he cried she provided none, and he paid the price for that when his superiors wrestled the document from him and carried out the execution Elizabeth wanted no part of.
It is a late-blooming Everyman crisis that materializes almost out of nowhere in the final stretch of the play, and, once he at last gets words to work with, Stanton proves quite affecting. "He was the 'Scooter' Libby of the 16th century," the actor cracked. "Do you know what's awful about it? It's all true. It's about three weeks of agonizing negotiations with Elizabeth boiled down into five minutes. He wasn't executed, but she destroyed his life. He had six kids. She turned her back on him. He was out of the tower in two years. She fined him so heavily, he lived in terrible debt. It was Mary's son, James I of England, who eventually said, 'I know you didn't kill my mother,' so he forgave him, and he also leavened the burden of debt for Davison's children."
All this, Stanton uncovered in a 500-page 19th century book by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicholas, called "The Life of William Davison." "There's a slight misogynist bent to it he doesn't like Elizabeth but I really fell in love with William Davison. He was described as 'the sweetest man who ever lived' by contemporaries, and he had at his disposal all of the records of trials he had to endure. With tears in his eyes before the star chamber, he refused to indict his queen. He said, 'She knows the truth.' He wouldn't say what it was. He was loyal to her right to the end. He was a good man."
Hickey's performance of the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's lifelong main-squeeze and master manipulator in his own right, is his first on Broadway since The Crucible seven years ago with Liam Neeson and Laura Linney, both of whom were in his corner on opening night. Hickey said, "Listen, if I have to wait a few years for a play to come along that's like this play, I'm happy to wait because a play like this is incredible."
He found an early echo of Leicester in him. "I feel, in some ways, he was what I was in high school. I think my motto in high school, unconsciously, was You can't hit a moving target.' Leicester is self-preservational, always looking for a way to better his position and a way out of trouble. He was the Chance Wayne of his day [Paul Newman in Sweet Bird of Youth] God! I wish I were young enough to do that!"
Walter is Hickey's primary playing partner, and he rhapsodizes about that. "I adore her. One of the things that I think is so inspirational about her performance is how she doesn't play an idea of Elizabeth. There's no real iconography there. I think that was a real conscious choice on the part of her and the director. There's no red wig, bald head, white makeup. It's just a woman, a very, very powerful, shrewd, brilliant, sensitive, deeply hurt woman, and Harriet brings so much humanity to the part, and she's different every night. She jumped up on that bench tonight. She has never done that before. She lifted all of that skirt and hurled herself up there. I'm in awe of her."
Leicester's amorous counterpoint in Mary's camp is Mortimer Paulet, played by Chandler Williams, exhibiting the sensitivity that brought him to Broadway prominence in the 2007 revival of Translations. His uncle, Sir Amias Paulet, Mary's jailer, is played by Michael Countryman, a Yank who adapts well to Brit speak. "This is one of the most wonderful casts I've ever worked with," Countryman added. "It's a very congenial atmosphere. It's the best way to portray this play."
Tony Carlin pretty much covers the waterfront in this play as courtier, officer and others when not understudying Adam Greer and Michael Rudko. "I like to keep all the balls in the air," he quipped. "I worked with Phyllida in Mamma Mia! This show was a little higher brow, but we did the same sort of breaking-it-down, and I really like the way Phyllida works. The Acting 101 exercise is to bring old and young and English and American all together onto the same page. The two stars have been great. Those queens really kicked it out, just brought it into high gear. They are mistresses of the art do you say 'mistresses' or masters'? I guess you say actors."
Also multi-tasking courtier, officer and others when not understudying Nicholas Woodeson and Countryman is Guy Paul. "The wonderful, the fabulous Phyllida has made all of us feel such a deep part of the play," he remarked warmly.
"This could well be the only show on Broadway right now that isn't miked," Paul beamed. "Did you notice? No miking. There's one effect on Harriet where it's supposed to be a big hall so they give you the feeling of a big hall. But, otherwise, no miking of the other voices. None. We do mike our feet occasionally when they want to get the ominous sound of feet approaching or all the men coming into court. We have mikes on the floor, and we have cleats on our shoes but that's it! It's a combination of two things well-trained voices and a set that's made out of slate.
"The floor of the stage is rock. Because it's slate and uneven, it's safer on stage than off during the rain scene. When you get off-stage, you're on slick wood. The slate is two inches thick, and it weighs thousands of pounds, and it's over the deck and it's all sealed, and we're on a very slight rake so the rain will drain down to the apron of the stage, go into a gutter and then goes down to a 180-gallon tank in the basement. It's recyclable. You gotta be green."
Glenn Close made the photo tip-sheet but not the play or the party. (She was set to film Schiller's Mary Stuart a few years back, directed by Richard Eyre, but the financing fell through at the last minute.) However, the evening was not skimpy on stars: Matthew Broderick (who's turning into The Philanthropist April 26 at Roundabout's American Airlines Theatre) with wife Sarah Jessica Parker, Cry-Baby's Elizabeth Stanley (bound for the Orient in Xanadu) with Christopher J. Hanke, playwright John Patrick Shanley, The Old Vic's ruling Yank Kevin Spacey (taking bows for his production of The Norman Conquests from some Saturday marathoners), Ralph Fiennes (who did God of Carnage with McTeer in London), Marcia Gay Harden (who's doing God of Carnage now on Broadway, checking out her Best Actress competition), Christine Baranski (who did the movie "Mamma Mia!" for Lloyd), Marian Seldes (heaping expected praise on Murray, her "serial" stage husband), Ron Leibman, Jessica Walter, Allison Janney and Michael X. Martin of the incoming 9 to 5, Dr. Xiuli Meng (sporting a sparkle-plenty engagement ring that would even impress Cindy Adams a gift over the weekend from her new fiancι, Aubrey Reuben, who photographs for this column), producer Marty Richards, columnist Roger Friedman, Mamma Mia! costumer Ann Roth, actress-producer Cynthia O'Neal, Impressionism's Jeremy Irons (schmoozing with his theatrical countrymen) and Nora Ephron.
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The cast of Mary Stuart take their opening night bow.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
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