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                                                                                THEATER, Page 60

Give My Regards To Malibu


Movie and TV stars stampede to Broadway, bringing old-fashioned
glamour, box-office clout and artistic sizzle

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III -- With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/
New York


    A year ago, Broadway was mired in the slough of despond,
waiting out the waning weeks of one of its skimpiest seasons and
wondering whether the Great White Way would ever glisten again.
As so often in the theater, the death rattle turned out to be
just a cough. This season the number of new productions has
shot up more than a third, from 28 to 38. Total attendance
since Jan. 1 has been 13.4% higher than in the same period last
year. The range of fare has been unusually broad, from tap dance
to Ibsen, from sitcom to Shakespeare. But the biggest buzz is
about the abundance of high-profile movie and TV stars who have
returned to the risks and rigors of the live stage.

    Want to share in the sweaty embraces of Alec Baldwin and
Jessica Lange? They are entwined in A Streetcar Named Desire.
Prefer the wry wit of Alan Alda or the in-your-face comic angst
of Judd Hirsch? They play beleaguered husbands and failed
fathers in splendid new tragi comedies from Neil Simon and Herb
Gardner. If your taste runs to grandes dames, Rosemary Harris
enacts the mean matriarch in Simon's previous play, Lost in
Yonkers, while Lynn Redgrave evokes the aggrieved wife of a
self-anointed genius in Ibsen's The Master Builder.

    Keith Carradine continues in the title role of the musical
The Will Rogers Follies, and Cyd Charisse has re-emerged via
Grand Hotel. In coming weeks they are being joined in musical
stardom by Raul Julia and pop singer Sheena Easton in Man of La
Mancha, Peter Gallagher (of the movie sex, lies, and videotape)
in Guys and Dolls and Gregory Hines in Jelly's Last Jam, a
portrait of composer Jelly Roll Morton. Next month Pulitzer
prizewinner August Wilson's subtly tragic and robustly comic Two
Trains Running will feature Larry Fishburne from the film Boyz
N the Hood, while the Australian drama Shimada, about a
Japanese-led corporate takeover, will offer Ellen Burstyn, Ben
Gazzara and Estelle Parsons. Al Pacino opens in two one-act
plays in late May.

    Other recent limited runs featured Martin Sheen in Arthur
Miller's The Crucible, Rob Lowe and Tony Randall in a Feydeau
farce (both shows from Randall's new National Actors Theater),
Jane Alexander in The Visit and, most opulently, Joan Collins,
whose Private Lives ended last week. Says Harvey Sabinson,
executive director of the League of American Theaters and
Producers: "None of us who have been around a long time can
recall a moment when so many major Hollywood stars came to
Broadway."

    Of all the current displays of star power, the most
profligate is Death and the Maiden, which opened last week. A
political thriller cum debate by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman
about the difficulties of shifting from dictatorship to
democracy, it stars five-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close as a
woman raped and tortured by the old regime who wants to hunt
down her abusers. Oscar winner Gene Hackman plays the genial
doctor who may or may not have been the blindfolded woman's
chief tormenter 15 years ago. Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss
portrays her husband, a liberal politician who seeks to preserve
the uneasy peace of the present even if it means suppressing the
truth of the past. Although the setting is described as
"probably" Chile, the play's polemics apply to a long, sad
roster of other places where the price of newfound freedom is
forceful forgetting. London critics have hailed a hard-edged
production there as "grasping the pulse of the century."

    Mike Nichols' staging, alas, is too ornate and stately,
its pace slowed by pregnant pauses and suspense-draining scene
changes. Moreover, the actors seem weirdly naturalistic for so
polemic a text. Close never gets crazy enough for the audience
to doubt whether she is right, as must happen to sustain
tension. Dreyfuss goes right to the expedient, exploitative core
of the husband without visiting the needed surface idealism and
charm. Hackman's performance does not engage guilt or innocence;
it remains stuck at bafflement throughout. These are
high-voltage talents giving low-wattage portrayals.

    Straight plays, especially on glum topics, are notoriously
hard to presell. But Dorfman's meditation opened to a
musical-size advance of $3.4 million, and mixed notices had no
evident impact at the box office. Streetcar has amassed an
impressive $2.4 million advance, despite having been revived on
Broadway just four years ago. Randall's subscription-based
troupe, which touts marquee names for each production, has
somehow filled seats for three abominable revivals in a row,
including last week's Master Builder.

    What accounts for the star stampede? The obvious answer is
just such box-office magic. Impresarios often conclude, as did
Roger Berlind of Death and the Maiden and Richard Seader of
Shimada, that a new script by an unknown author absolutely
requires star clout. Says Berlind: "The average straight play
costs more than $1 million to produce. Doing one on Broadway
without the protection of name recognizability is almost a lost
business." Seader is even blunter: "We were originally
considering off-Broadway. I don't think we would have done
Shimada on Broadway without stars."

    With revivals, the text is virtually an afterthought save
as a star vehicle. Says producer Charles Duggan of Private
Lives: "There are two ways to compete for audiences against
films and videotapes. One is with spectacle, and the other is
with star power." Even so, Duggan concedes, there can be too
much of a good thing. He booked Collins at a time when he
expected to be offering audiences a unique touch of glamour. But
a jumble of long-discussed projects from various producers all
came to pass at about the same time, and suddenly rival stars
were everywhere.

    For some actors, the move to Broadway reflects recession
cutbacks in Hollywood. Actors who cannot command film work at
their asking price often prefer to switch to the stage, which
the industry views as a prestigious but separate business,
rather than agree to slip back down Hollywood's money ladder.
Not that Broadway pay is exactly monastic. While Pacino will
work for $1,000 a week in a nonprofit house, some stars command
up to 10% of box-office gross, as much as $20,000 a week. For
many, the choice is artistic. They want to play classic roles,
work with particular directors or co-stars, or demonstrate
talent in a way films do not allow. Baldwin, for example,
spurned a reported $1 million for a sequel to The Hunt for Red
October to take on Stanley Kowalski, the role that made Marlon
Brando. Says Baldwin: "It's thrilling."

    Although star casting seems an instant boon, drawing in
new and younger audiences and allowing more plays to have
larger-scale life, some theater leaders fret that they may be
doing themselves long-term harm, creating a costly or even
unsustainable expectation that every show will have a splash of
celebrity. Says Emanuel Azenberg, who produces Neil Simon's
work: "The real problems the theater has are not solved by a
momentary sense of breath that the stars bring us." Instead of
thinking about how to cut costs and reach a broader audience,
producers who employ stars typically have to accede to higher
salaries and shorter runs and thus raise ticket prices -- to a
$50 top for Streetcar and Maiden -- to try to recoup faster.

    There's nothing wrong with star casting when the role
fits, as it does with Baldwin and Alda and Hirsch. When a show
really goes wrong, performers are rarely the problem, anyway.
Last week's biggest Broadway fiasco was a ponderously staged
pedantic pageant from stage luminaries -- writer John Guare,
actors Stockard Channing and James Naughton and director Sir
Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Like
all Guare's plays, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun deals with
ordinary people's inability to accept ordinariness, their
yearning for mythic and epic significance. But it thwarts itself
by hanging its plot on a somber and respectful treatment of the
abrupt sexual infatuation and love-suicide pact of a pair of
13-year-olds. Shakespeare could bring it off in Verona. In
Guare's rural Sicily, it seems mere wind. Mae West couldn't make
it worse, and Richard Burbage couldn't make it better.