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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Waiting for . . . 9 to 5 — Sam & Dolly, Together Again
By Harry Haun
01 May 2009
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Waiting for Godot stars John Goodman, Nathan Lane, John Glover and Bill Irwin; guests Martha Plimpton, Kathleen Marshall and Boyd Gaines.
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Meet the creators of Broadway's Waiting for Godot and 9 to 5: The Musical, which opened — in a rare occurrence — on the same night.
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Samuel Beckett, the brainy Irish modernist and dramatist, and Dolly Parton, the busty country-music composer and chantoosie — names that have never come up before in the same sentence — collided April 30, the absolute tail-end of 2008-09 Tony Award eligibility, and gave their greatest hits a spin to see if they could pick up a few prizes.
Parton augmented her Oscar-nominated chart-buster of 1980, "Nine to Five," with 16 new numbers to make the musical that just sashayed into the Marriott Marquis, titled by the numbers 9 to 5: The Musical. Beckett is hanging at Studio 54, which has been turned into a stark, spartan rocky mountain pass where outlaws in Republic Pictures might have roamed but where two vagabonds do their Waiting for Godot, for Roundabout Theatre Company.
Both shows feaure characters involved in exercises in human frustration and futility, spinning one's wheels through life in ever-widening circles, ignored and dejected, always hoping for an end to suffering and pushing onward to find it. It gets us through life, but there's no road map to avoid the bumpy terrain for the common man, whether it's the Everyman of Waiting for Godot or the female workforce emerging in offices of the '70s in 9 to 5.
This is believed to be the first time two Broadway shows have butted heads for the same opening night, and it proved a real quandary for those who regularly file first-night reports. The fourth estate, collectively but individually, weighted the variables of both — the metaphysical overtones, the intellectual undercurrents, the symbolic stances, the songs — and opted, as one, to go with the show with the bigger breasts.
Which sent publicists at Boneau/Bryan-Brown scrambling for Plan B — a pre-show press meet with Godot's four-man cast at "54" a couple of hours before "half-hour."
The current fruitless wait for Mr. Godot (this production uses the French pronunciation — GOD-oh — not the American) — was instigated by Bill Irwin, who played the ramblingly verbose Lucky in Mike Nichols' Lincoln Center production with Steve Martin, Robin Williams and F. Murray Abraham. Now, one and 20 years later, Irwin decided time has come for a go at Martin's role of Vladimir.
"I only know that this role has always spoken to me," Irwin admitted. "From the first time I read the play, this guy — and the way he looks at the world and the brave, sad but brave, attempt he makes to make it make sense — has always spoken to me."
Consequently, he continued, "I've been a nag around Broadway for years and years, saying, 'You know, this play — with the right people — could work for an American audience, with an American voice in the company on a big Broadway stage,' and people would often say, 'That is so true.' And then I'd never hear from them again."
He eventually turned — transatlantically — to British director Anthony Page, who not only steered Irwin to a Tony for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? but also worked with Beckett on the first London revival of Waiting for Godot in 1965. It was the Eureka! heard 'round the world, and there was seismic movement on the project.
All of Page's first choices responded with an immediate yes: Nathan Lane for Estragon, John Goodman for Pozzo and John Glover for Lucky. (Truth to tell, David Strathairn signed up first for Lucky but bowed out because of an injured ankle.)
"I wanna play all the characters before they put me away," declared Irwin, "except the boy" (Cameron Clifford and Matthew Schechter are double-cast as the youthful messenger from Godot). "But I think it would be very hard to go to the role that Nathan is playing. He and I, fascinatingly enough, have loved this play decades — since we were in high school — unbeknownst to each other for a long time.
"Early on, I had this pretentious thought of doing the play and then switching roles in the middle of the run. Various people have said this, but we realized in the course of this work that it's a bit like saying to Jascha Heifitz, 'Why don't you play piano and Artur Rubenstein will play fiddle?' They are so demanding — in different ways."
For that matter, Irwin can't go back and recall Lucky's epic speech. "It's very, very familiar as John is saying it. But I couldn't pick it up and take it when he used to get lost in the rehearsal room, no no. Maybe he was thinking I'd help him out but I couldn't and didn't. It does have an interior logic. I've heard him talk about that. And, from night to night, I tried to find it when I did it. It's one of the most amazing speeches ever written — not just because it's long and complicated but because, as our great Anthony Page says, 'It's like a broken attempt at rationality.' And it hits the Human Condition in a sort of nutshell in a way. We like to think that we are perfectly rational animals, and I think we carry around the notion that maybe once we were. We adore the Classical Period or the Renaissance Period. That's when Human Reasoning was very strong. But we feel like we're fallen from there — like we're fallen creatures, and that's the speech. And that's John Glover in a nutshell."
Glover, who also gives good spittle ("I call upon Godot, I guess, to help me"), seems to have mastered his torrent of spoken words. "It's three pages of unpunctuated words, and it's very intimidating at first glance," he admitted. "In fact, I tried to run from taking the job. Frightening! But Anthony was wonderful, guiding me through it. We worked very slowly on it. I remember Patti LuPone had told me that she asked Arthur Laurents if she could touch on 'Roses Turn' every day of rehearsal, and so I told Anthony that story and asked if we could do the speech at least for a portion of the day — y'know, a half-hour or an hour — so I'd come in early and we'd work on it just because I was so intimidated by it. It's really a humdinger of a speech."
Despite his sitcom past and his high-profile flicks, Goodman has gravitated toward avant garde in his New York theatre choices — Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth in Central Park at the Delacorte, now this — why is that? "Somebody asked me."
At one point the massive Goodman falls down and can't get up, looking to all the world like a beached baby whale. His mental image was "a walrus lookin' for a snack. That was it last night. It might change. It was really hard was what it was. It was different from anything I've ever done before. It's been a long time since I did a play. You can't lay off that long, I don't think, at my age. I rust up pretty quick."
His last stage work was Big Daddy in Los Angeles, but he began in theatre here. "I worked with Nathan 30 years ago on Midsummer Night's Dream at the Equity Library Theatre."
The tragicomedy sheen of Godot was an inevitable point of attraction for Lane. "It was a play I've always loved and felt I would do, at some point. Then, when they said Bill was gonna do it and they wanted me to do it, I said, 'Yes, absolutely.'"
Lane, of course, was too young to have seen Bert Lahr's Estragon, but "I certainly have seen that famous Richard Avedon photo, and there's a recording of it they did with the whole original cast — E. G. Marshall, Alvin Epstein and Kurt Kasznar. Every time E. G. says, 'We're waiting for Godot,' there's an echo-chamber effect. I'm sure they thought it was a nifty Rod Serling touch."
In terms of difficulty, Lane said, "This is certainly the hardest thing I've ever done. I know Bill feels the same way. It's really challenging and asks a lot of all of us, but, I mean, that's why you wanna do something like this. It's a play that's elusive. One minute you're poetic, and the next you're doing a Who's-On-First routine. It has these lightning-quick transitions. But, ultimately it's been rewarding because of the reaction we've been getting. People sorta say the play really made sense to them in this production. I think we've found a good balance of the comedy and the tragedy."
Such has not always been the case: "Believe me, I've seen really boring productions. I've seen lotta bad productions of it. And, as Elaine Stritch said to me, 'Oh Nathan, if that play's not funny, it's one long frigging night in the theatre.'"
Nicol Williamson, Paul Curran, Alfrie Rich and Jackie McCarren starred in Page's 44-year-old revival of Waiting for Godot, but working with The Master is the brain-burning memory. "Beckett came and worked with us at the Royal Court, which was a bit intimidating until he arrived, and then it wasn't at all intimidating," the director recalled. "I don't think I would've dared to have done it otherwise, but I had an idea of what he wanted. He wanted the tone of the voice to be real and to be what he intended them to be. He heard it all very clearly. That's what interested him — not a sort of theory about the play. He said he'd written it not knowing what would come next. He'd just heard these voices, and he'd gone on writing. I guess that was true. He was very specific about how the voices were pitched, and how they were relating to each other. He was very interested in the laughs, but he would never watch with an audience. He never came in with the audience. He'd stay till the last rehearsal." Continued...
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