Entertainment

A Will to make it on Broadway

On Broadway, they’re calling it “the Denzel effect.”

Denzel Washington‘s tri umphant run in “Fences” — which closed Sunday after breaking box-office records at the Cort Theatre and racking up a profit of nearly $3 million — has inspired other Hollywood stars, many of them African-American, to think about doing a Broadway play.

Halle Berry, as The Post first reported, is signing up for “The Mountaintop,” a new drama about Martin Luther King Jr. that will also star Samuel L. Jackson.

I’m also hearing that Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith have been approached to play Stanley and Stella Kowalski in a revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” opening early next year.

Now, before all you rich people start waving your black AmEx cards to take advantage of those “special VIP offers”; before you drive the price of every seat in the orchestra up to $450; before you breeze past the line of less privileged theatergoers who’ve been standing outside the venue all day hoping, usually in vain, for returns — just know that this little project is far from being a done deal.

Smith and Pinkett are giving it some thought. That’s all.

I’ll let you know when the contracts are signed and the theater is booked.

Smith and Pinkett are looking for a play because they’ve had a lot of fun hanging around Broadway this year.

They co-produced “Fela!”

They cheered Washington on his opening night.

They even went to the Tony Awards, that wonderfully glamorous affair that’ll be even more glamorous next year when it’s at the United Palace Theater at Broadway and 175th Street.

(The Tony Ball, by the way, will be across the street at El Malecon, a Dominican restaurant that serves very tasty rotisserie chicken and is known to be a favorite hangout of Angela Lansbury.)

Emily Mann is directing the revival of “Streetcar.” Her last Broadway outing — Nilo Cruz‘s “Anna and the Tropics” — was not, I have to say, all that riveting. It was, in fact, downright sleep-inducing. But sources say she’s got a lively take on “Streetcar” that impressed producer Stephen Byrd.

Byrd hit on a winning formula when he presented Terrence Howard, James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad in an all-black “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” in 2007.

Also coming to Broadway in September is Patti LaBelle, who’ll be playing the mother in “Fela!” for a month or so while the great Lillias White goes off to do some concerts in Australia.

Aretha Franklin was also interested in the part. But then she saw the show and noticed that the mother sings one song from the top of the ladder.

“I’m not climbing that ladder every night!” she said.

And that was that.

VANESSA Redgrave, who is bril liant but bonkers, is coming to Broadway with James Earl Jones in “Driving Miss Daisy.”

Which is as good an excuse as any to relate the following story, told to me at dinner this week by a veteran producer:

The all-star cast of the 1974 movie “Murder on the Orient Express” assembled in a suite at the Savoy Hotel in London to read the screenplay. Gathered round the table were Albert Finney, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Lauren Bacall, John Gielgud, Anthony Perkins and Redgrave.

The producer, Lord Brabourne, addressed the stars: “Ladies and gentleman. Equity requires us to break for lunch in two hours. But we do not want to keep you here all day, so we are having lunch brought up. Please help yourself at any time, and we can all go home early.”

Silver carts with food and drink were wheeled into the room.

Redgrave stood up and pounded the table.

“Comrades,” she declared, “our union is made up of many actors who are not stars, and they are not treated the way we are. We owe it to them to follow Equity rules. Our union means nothing if we do not break for lunch in two hours.”

Whereupon Bacall stood up, walked over to one of the carts and filled her plate.

“Vanessa,” she said, “I’m going to eat, read and leave. So shut up.”

michael.riedel@nypost.com