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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: The Philanthropist Word-Wild But Not Wise
By Harry Haun
27 Apr 2009
This is Grindley's fourth Broadway show in two years, and he's obviously quite smitten with the way they do things over here. "I absolutely love it," he exclaimed so there would be no doubt. "The actors are tremendous, particularly in the working circumstances that I've had. The opportunity to produce and mount the show to the way I want it has been unparalleled, really, and I've been very, very fortunate in the casts I've been able to attract and the quality of production values I've been able to bring to the work here. It's a thrill. I'll come back every time they want me."
But his upcoming workload will keep him away from The Great White Way for a while. "I'm doing A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Shakespeare festival at Stratford, then I've got a show back in England toward the end of the year. It's very hush-hush, but it's at The Old Vic. There'll be an announcement at the end of May."
Most of these interviews were done in the spacious entranceway of the American Airlines Theatre, then stars and celebs were whisked four doors west on 42nd Street to party headquarters at the B.B. King Blues Club & Grill. Metal barricades kept back reality and a full complement of 42nd Street's usual rowdy, rubber-necking rabble.
Sarah Jessica Parker made the press rounds with husband Broderick, taking the backseat position and beaming proudly. Privately, she confessed to a bad case of simpatico nerves. Their six-year-old (named James, after Broderick's actor-dad), who rounds out this family of lefties, has yet to set Daddy at work. "The play's a little bit too sophisticated for him," Parker understated, "but he's going to come backstage in a couple of weeks and stay backstage during the show looking at his father act."
Broderick admitted an immediate attraction for the play and the character. "I just liked it when I read it, honestly," he said. "Roundabout sent it to me, and I was kinda looking for something. I hadn't done a play in a while, and I'd done a bunch of movies. I didn't know anything about the play. I'd always heard that it was good play though, and a very interesting character. It's seriously a pleasure to read it over and over again and get to know Chris Hampton a bit. I admire this play enormously."
He found several ways to hook into the character. "I kinda like his passionate desire to please other people, which make him 'live in a state of terror,' as he says. All actors feel that, I think. And he has his difficulty communicating with his fiancιe. A lot of people can relate to that. She says, 'You don't understand what I'm trying to say,' and he says, 'Maybe not, but I think I usually understand what you do say.'"
When a reporter asked if he wore a gray wig, Parker could contain herself no more and burst forth with: "No, that's his hair. He has earned every single one of them."
It's somehow easy to forget that 26 years have elapsed since he made his Tony-winning Main Stem bow in Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs. The fact that it will be revived this fall with Simon's follow-up, Broadway Bound, sent Broderick off on a comic riff much to Parker's delight: "I wish them nothing but ill. I just hope they fail horribly because I'm not in it so why do it? Good luck in finding somebody like me." Then, he post-scripted in penance: "No, I kid. Those are great plays."
Weber recognized it might be a blow to the system to have two Blooms on stage at once. "I know it's frightening. Too much talent on that stage. Too much Bloom. It's a bouquet. A bouquet of Blooms."
Another thing the two have in common is that when these roles were first introduced on Broadway, Alec McCowen's Philip was Tony-nominated, as was Ed Zimmermann's Donald. "He was?" Weber questioned incredulously. Then, pausing a beat, he too went into a funny rant. "I expect that to happen again. You may start the rumors right now also for an Obie and a Pulitzer. Earl Wilson wrote a rave for me."
On a more serious note, he admitted he was pleased with the character he was playing. "I love that he's vulnerable," he said straight-off. "And, also, the particular quality that this character has is not one that you usually see in a play. It's odd. It's a complex kind of emotion. It kinda just occurs to him that he leads a useless life."
His Donald organizes the party, which uncouples in an unexpected way. "It's almost a given that these rakish professors are going to end up with some young filly. I'm trying to get the sexpot, but I end up with this girl who turns out to be a whirlwind. Apparently, these kinds of mixers are kinda common. I'm married to an English woman, Juliet Hohnen, so I know a little bit about getting together with English people and drinking. She has been working on my English accent for 16 years."
Coming from Worthing, England, Cake had no accent problem and flaunted it in the role of the obnoxious literary light who's given to socially startling pronouncements like "Masturbation is the thinking man's television." Clearly, Cake doesn't cater to audience sympathy: "I've had to reconcile myself to that throughout my career. If I had to shy away from being disliked, I wouldn't get much work. It's very intriguing to me why egotists are egotists, why people feel the need to dominate the room like some people do. I feel that always comes from some more interesting psychological place. Generally, it's deep unhappiness, which is definitely the case with this guy."
Hastening those negative audience vibes is a sleazy, downward-turned mustache properly out of the '70s. "I call it 'Misinterpreted in Chelsea,'" Cake quipped. "This is where I live. I've been getting a lot of Welcome Home kind of looks. It's a cheap Lee Majors impersonation, but it seems to work in the context of the three-piece, multi-colored bell-bottom suit, but, outside in the real world, it's weird. Someone had to wear some pretty embarrassing facial hair for the team, and I feel like I took that hit. My character would be the one putting himself in the way of that. It would be hard not to have a good time with this character. Simply the fact that I come on in this extraordinary hologram of a suit, with Cuban stacked heels and massive bouffant hairdo I mean, it's hard to ignore him. I can only mess it up from there on."
Soule, as the party's still-waters-run-deep mystery lady, also has no accent worries, but then she has no words. "I got to show up to rehearsal the first day off-book," she cracked, "but the part is trickier than I thought it would be, actually. It's all a kind of exercise in simplicity and subtlety and how do you dissolve and then reappear as a presence without having the use of your words and a voice to speak them. It was fun to play with. Her interactions with the other people that's what heightens it."
Ellington, who begins the show with a figurative and literal bang, seems to play the novice playwright in total italics, and getting to that high-strung state where he is at the top of the show hasn't been very easy. "I think I'm the one that halfway freaks people out backstage," he said. "Usually, I just go in and listen to music. There's a song that I like that has a very sort of droning beat by Mark Kazolok. It's a great song. It sounds like a murder, basically, and it always seems to get me pretty much there."
Mudge, as the easy mark of the evening who makes a play for Broderick's character, has been doing heavy-duty work Off-Broadway (Dutchman, Pavilion) mostly in low-cut dresses. "I love this character. I think she's lonely. I feel bad for her. At the start, I think I judged her, but, as we rehearsed it, I decided she's really a sweet soul.
"Matthew has been a dream to work with. He made me feel like I'm Nathan Lane. He's one of the best people to play a scene with. There are only ten lines in our last scene, but it seems like seven minutes because there's so much in-between.
"It's very important to me to be part of the New York community. To have people like Margaret Colin and Kevin Geer and John Benjamin Hickey come up to me after the show and be so nice to me is incredible because I think they're awesome. I like movie stars just fine, but I really like theatre folk the best, I think."
Lane, who has an opening this week himself (Waiting for Godot, at Studio 54, on April 30), headed up the cheering section for his old Producers pal. And Broderick's best bud from school, playwright Kenneth Lonergan, was present, revealing that the play he wrote for Broderick and once promised for Broadway, Starry-Eyed Messenger, will instead surface Off-Broadway next season on The New Group's schedule, with Broderick starring and Lonergan directing. "It hasn't officially been announced yet," said the author. Broderick will again play a teacher but one on the low-end of the academic ladder, teaching astronomy at the Natural History Museum.
Mrs. Lonergan the super-gifted J. Smith Cameron, to you said she was headed to the Bay Street Theatre at the end of July for Dinner, a 2002 play by British dramatist Moira Buffini. "It's a very dark comedy, and it has not been done in New York yet. David Esbjornson will direct, and Mercedes Ruehl and Reed Birney co-star."
Director Grindley had his own support system going as well, made up mostly of actors from his previous Broadway shows. Brenda Pressley, who played the very alert maid in The American Plan, had a place of honor at his table, and Boyd Gaines and Jefferson Mays who co-starred in Grindley's Pygmalion and Tony-winning revival of Journey's End made the rounds with their respective and quite attractive wives.
Producer Jed Bernstein was singing the praises of a recent reading of a musicalized Kind Hearts and Coronets, where Mays did Alec Guinness' old hat-trick of ten roles, bringing along assorted hats and props so that each character came lavishly to life. The music and lyrics are by the talented Steven Lutvak, who's long-overdue a hit.
Other first-nighters included Debra Monk and goddaughter Emma Tammi, Roundabout's Gene Feist and Todd Haimes, costume designer Martin Pakledinaz, David Pittu, Bill Irwin, choreographer-actor Josh Prince, Betsy Aidem, Jerry Stiller, Catch Me If You Can's Scott Wittman, Tony Walton, Shrek's David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, Swoosie Kurtz (fresh from playing a corrupt judge on "Law and Order" "It's going to be on a week from Tuesday. They work so fast."), Brooks Ashmanskas (taking some ribbing about his billing for The Public's current Christopher Durang, Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them: "Hooters Consultant" he, obviously, got it all wrong!), Ron Rifkin, set designer Tony Walton, producer Jeff Richards, playwright Douglas Carter Beane, Roger Rees and Rick Elice, director Jo Bonney and Eric Bogosian, Martha Plimpton, director Charles Randolph Wright, Dana Ivey, The Language of Trees author and director Steven Levenson and Alex Timbers, Speech and Debate's Jason Fuchs (who wrapped a new flick last month), "E.R." and "Law and Order" regular Julianne Nicholson (a.k.a. Mrs. Jonathan Cake), directors Mark Brokaw and Bobby Longbottom, composer Philip Glass and Carolyn McCormick.
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The cast of The Philanthropist at curtain call
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
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