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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Accent on Youth — The Muddle Years
By Harry Haun
30 Apr 2009
Lisa Banes is another recovered theatre soul from the vineyards of West Coast television ("I'm back — what the heck, right?"). She puts a shine to the cameo of an actress "of a certain age." The wicked way she tips her lesbian hand is a caution.
"This cast is fabulous," said Banes. "We're breathing life into a play that deserves it."
Rosie Benton is the more age-appropriate actress making a play for Pierce — a part in which Lilli Palmer handily stole one of the movies made of Accent on Youth. "That's what I heard. I haven't seen it, but I've had people mentioning it to me."
Benton's character is less lucky, making a grand and dignified exit holding a wastebasket full of discarded red roses. "Years of acting school, and there I am, actually with a wastebasket," sighed Benton, self-amused. "Oh, my God, it's so fun to do this part. I feel actors live their whole lives trying not to act like actors. For once, it's fun to really get to do that. It's license to kill — be as dramatic as I want to be.
"And that opera gown Jane Greenwood has given me to wear. I don't even have to think about it. That great dress at the end is a blast. I love Jane for that gown."
When the curtain rises on the handsome '30s-vintage office that John Lee Beatty provides Pierce, Byron Jennings is sitting center-stage perusing a script with great disdain, pulling you back to that period with The Great "Profeel," reminding one if not actually of John Barrymore at least of Warren William (Julian Marsh in "42nd Street"). He comes this close to a huffy exit when Pierce appears and charms him into the part (not an old lech at all but a middle-aged romantic searching for a genuine relationship.) The character stays and plays and becomes a matinee rage.
"He's a character who doesn't really have that much stage time," allowed Jennings, "but I particularly love — as an actor — to have the arc that I have in the play — from a very tight actor who is trying to get a job but not wanting to do something that is against his principles to a guy who has totally let go of everything and has become a kind of drunk bon vivant and is out on the town all the time, trying to figure out new ways to apologize to his wife for having been on a bender for so much of the time. And then you get him in the third act where he is completely mellowed and he's kinda happy with his life and his wife. It's a great kind of evening for me."
A cluster of the Curtains cast showed up in support of its Tony-winning headliner, Pierce, and twinkled brightly around the party: Debra Monk with Steel Pier beau Jim Newman, Jason Danieley and wife Marin Mazzie, choreographer Rob Ashford and Edward Hibbert with The 39 Steps director Maria Aitken.
The latter is currently plotting a New York production of Simon Gray's Quartermaine's Terms . . . Hibbert just inhabited Mrs. Warren's Profession at the McCarter for director Emily Mann and is now working on a very hush-hush one-man play. . . Newman is Broadway-bound after the first of the year, along with Joe Nichols and Tony winner Carlin Glynn, in Pure Country from the writer-director of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, Pete(r) Masterson. . . . And the Tony-nominated star of The Best Little Whorehouse Goes Public, Dee Hoty, said she's "waiting for that phone call" to join Pure Country. . . . Mazzie is hopping A Streetcar Named Desire to the Barrington Stage Company Aug. 6-29 in a production directed by Barrington's artistic director, Julianne Boyd, and co-starring Christopher Innvar, Sara Surrey and Kevin Carolan, but, before that, Ashford's Streetcar Named Desire will take him to London where he will open July 28 in a version that will star Rachel Weisz, Elliott Cowan and Ruth Wilson.
Tony winner (for Doubt) Adriane Lennox just got back from Atlanta where she filmed Sandra Bullock's "Blindside" — in time to start shooting "The Sorceress' Apprentice" here with Nicolas Cage. "I haven't been doing much theatre," she said, "but The First Wives' Club comes up in June in San Diego. We're doing a production of it at the Old Globe with Karen Ziemba, Kevin Morrow, John Dossettt and Barbara Walsh. We're supposed to have a small reading of it May 11." Francesca Zambello, who plopped The Little Mermaid down in the Broadway pool, is directing.
Lyricist Susan Birkenhead isn't in idle, waiting for her Charles Strouse-Bob Martin musical, Minsky's, to hit town next season. On June 1, there will be a reading of the musical she has done with composer Henry Krieger and book rewriter Daniel Goldfarb, Radio Girl. It's based on "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm" — not the classic Kate Douglas Wiggin novel but the radically overhauled screenplay for Shirley Temple's '39 film. The people who produced Grey Gardens are behind this.
Also first-nighting-it were Charlayne Woodard, record mogul Clive Davis, jazz vocalist Gregory Generet and actress-wife Tamara Tunie (that's GG&TT for Twitters), actresses Geraldine Hughes and Becky Ann Baker, Proof's Tony-winning author David Auburn, directors Walter Bobbie and Erica Schmidt, twice-Tonyed Swoosie Kurtz and producer-publicist Jim Baldassare, Carol Kane, playwright Theresa Rebeck and her amusing muse Julie White, former Friedman flak Bob Ullmann, columnist Michael Musto (who discreetly slips out of his flip-flops during the performance but puts them back on for intermission), Buck Henry, playwright Liz Flahive, "Sheer Genius" host Rene Fris, keeper of George S.'s flame Anne Kaufman Schneider, NY1's working critic Roma Torre, producer Daryl Roth (who, along with Ostar Productions and Rebecca Gold / Debbie Bisno, enhanced the Art Deco elegance of this production), Charles Busch plus his allergist and the allergist's wife, Mrs. Byron Jennings (actress Carolyn McCormick), Anna in the Tropics' lead actress and its Pulitzer Prize-winning author Daphne Rubin-Vega and Nilo Cruz, attorney-producer John Breglio (have you caught his "Every Little Step" documentary on his A Chorus Line revival?), Frances Sternhagen (who's wrapping a couple of "Closer" episodes) with Gareth Saxe (who's inching closer to New York with A Moon To Dance By — from Pittsburgh to New Brunswick's George Street Playhouse) and Paul Anthony Stewart.
"I never thought I'd be in a starring category — I always assumed I'd be in supporting — but they can put me wherever they want to put me," said Daniel Breaker about his puzzling Drama Desk nomination as Shrek's jackass sidekick. "You know, my wife [Ruined director Kate Whoriskey] got a Drama Desk nomination, too." This particular evening, she had cast herself as nurturing mom and stayed home with their sick infant. An unexpected duo, these two: she helms Pultizer Prize plays, he plays sassy donkey to Brian d'Arcy James. "Power couple of New York, right?" Breaker cracks about their laughably incongruous image.
Others present included A. R. "Pete" Gurney and John Tillinger, the man who'll direct the revival of his play, Children, this summer at Westport with Judith Ivey, Katie Finneran, James Waterston and Mary Bacon. Gurney's next "gig" will be The Grand Manner, which Mark Lamos will direct at Lincoln Center in December.
Robert Osborne, your genial Turner Classics Movies host, was itemizing how many movies he had seen based on Accent on Youth: There was the one in 1935 with the play's title with Herbert Marshall and "Saliva" Sidney, there was a musical remake in 1950 with Bing Crosby and Nancy Olson, "Mr. Music," and there was the nonmusical remake in 1959 with Clark Gable and Carroll Baker, "But Not for Me," where Ella Fitzgerald gorgeously addresses the title tune over the opening credits.
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The cast of Accent on Youth take their opening night bow.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
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