Broadway, Encores!, Fantasticks and the Reagans

"Broadway...! Broadway...! How Great Thou Are....I'll Leave the Farm...With All It's Charm...To Be A Broadway Star......!"
-- Baby June in GYPSY.
Loved seeing GYPSY last summer at ENCORES with Patti Lupone...sat in the front row and applauded madly. Lupone is the right age and completely the right person to play Mama Rose...very tough...very street smart. I was thrilled to see GYPSY coming back to Broadway (they've already put up the marquee at the St. James Theatre on W. 44th St.). My friend Hilary Knight (Eloise books) knows the real Baby June (actress June Havoc).
This has been a real week for theatre...on Saturday Feb. 9 I attended the ENCORES Production of APPLAUSE at City Center. It's the 1972 musicalization of All About Eve...this one starred Christine Ebersole as Margo Channing and although she always puts in a good, professional performance, everything else was wrong. The gossip at the theatre was that she had the flu during rehearsals and was still weak. The consenus of my friends was that Ebersole comes off too "nice" to play the Broadway diva bitch originated by Bette Davis and played in 1972 by Bacall. I've met Christine Ebersole at American Theatre Wing events and she was always snooty and aloof to me, but onstage she comes off "too nice." If the show moves to Broadway, we all agreed the perfect choice would be Glenn Close, who is a lovely, charming woman in real life but comes off as a perfect "bitch" onstage.

Yesterday, Wednesday, they had free tickets at Actor's Equity to see The Fantasticks Off Broadway at the Snapple/Jerry Ohrbach Theate for the 2pm matinee, so we grabbed a couple. This is a fairly new Off Broadway theatre located on the third floor of a former office building at the corner of 50th Street and Broadway. Even though I saw The Fantasticks 100 times probably (with my tourists) Off Broadway downtown at the Sullivan Street Playhouse (gone) in the West Village, I figured what the hell...its free....its a rainy, snowy, terrible day...might as well see it again. Plus my next door neighbor, Nick Spangler--a former NYU grad who is 22 ( http://www.myspace.com/spangleyman ), is in the show playing Matt (the boy). Nick and I live in twin apt. buildings next door to each other. The funny thing is we both live in Apt. 37 in our respective buildings and we sometimes get mail for each other. The other day I got a huge box for him delivered to my apt. instead so I called him and when he came to pick it up, we chatted a bit and he said he was doing The Fantasticks but it was closing soon. Wouldn't you know that yesterday Nick was NOT in the show! The show, closing in 10 days, is FULL of understudies! The production was just so-so, mostly because the piano was too loud to hear the un-miked performers. The black box theatre has poor acoustics because it was a converted office. In such a space, the piano needs to play SOFT instead of pounding away during the softly sung, unmiked vocals.

Today is Valentine's Day and I'm going to see COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA at Manhattan Theatre Club's Biltmore Theatre with my elderly friends Marilyn & Bob Reagan. They have been friends since just after I moved to New York "from the farm"...lovely people in every way, except now Bob, who is past 80, is showing the beginning of Alzheimer's and Marilyn, who loves theatre and New York as much as I do, is trying to keep him alert, active and interested in things. Marilyn is originally from Utah, loves theatre and joins many groups and is always hearing about special ticket offers, etc. She invites me many times because: 1. we always have fun, 2. it helps her with Bob to have another person there (in case there are issues where a men's room is needed or another pair of eyes to watch or a strong pair of arms to assist). Bob is very ambulatory but its a progressive illness and he has good days and bad days. I met Marilyn over 20 years ago in an Upper Westside tap dancing class taught by the great Bob Audy. In our class we had a mix of aspiring Broadway chorus kids, housewives (Marilyn), the occasional star or celeb like Judy Blume the children's book author (I'll blog about her tomorrow), Mary Tyler Moore (bitch), Tom Hulce, Mandy Patinkin, and others. After I became acquainted with Marilyn & Bob, they invited to their weekend home in Connecticut a few times and we all became friends. Then one day Marilyn told me about this murder that happened in Utah which affected her. It seems a multi-millionaire businessman had been shot in cold blood in a long-unsolved murder. Then it finally came to light that Mark (the man's grandson) had shot his grandpa...the strange twist: young 16 year old Mark had been directed by his mother to do the murder. And the revelation: The woman was a New York Eastside socialite named Frances and this was Marilyn's sister (her evil sister)! I had followed the whole thing in the news but didn't realize this was Marilyn's FAMILY!! Anyway, Marilyn & Bob were telling everybody because the whole thing was back in the news, books and mini-series were being written and they wanted their personal friends to hear it from them FIRST. I even accompanied Marilyn to the Phil Donahue Show one day when Bob was at work so she had somebody to "lean" on in the Green Room.
Two books and two mini-series based on these books were the result: At Mother's Request by CBS News reporter Jonathan Coleman and NUTCRACKER by Shana Alexander. I'll mention more about these friends later.
I may see another show tomorrow...still deciding. There are SO many mid-winter shows that I want to see and for once I have the time and the money and almost everything good is on the half=price discount booth in February.
Happy Valentine's Day!!