Name your favorite diva, and it’s a good bet she’s gone after the plum role of the season: Helen Sinclair, the boozing leading lady of Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.”
Divas are usually “offer-only,” which is showbiz lingo for, “I don’t audition, I field offers.”
But everybody auditions for Woody Allen, and so a parade of leading ladies swallowed their egos and made like chorus kids at a cattle call.
Patti LuPone, Bernadette Peters and Betty Buckley (my nominee for the part) have all strutted their stuff for Allen and his director, Susan Stroman.
Auditioning for Allen is, I’m told, unnerving. For one thing, he seldom makes eye contact with the performer.
“He looks down at the floor,” a source says. “Susan’s warm and gracious. He says nothing. Not even ‘Thank you.’ ”
LuPone came in with diva guns blazing, wowing everybody with her pipes and wit.
When she left, Woody mumbled: “I don’t see her in the part.” Next!
So who’s his top choice?
The name being whispered around Shubert Alley is Marin Mazzie.
She did a reading of the musical over the summer and impressed Allen with her comic timing. But the producers wanted a bigger name, and so the divas came a-calling.
But Allen has circled back to Mazzie, a Tony nominee for that splendid 2000 revival of “Kiss Me, Kate.”
Mazzie is playing the role in a second workshop — which for some reason Allen insists on calling a “lab” — at the end of the month.
As far as who’ll be in “Bullets,” the producers said, “A few of the roles have not been cast . . . including the role of Helen Sinclair. Decisions will be made about casting the role for Broadway after the lab is complete.”
Of the decisions already made, Zach Braff, of “Scrubs” fame, has been chosen as the young playwright who’s forced to cast a witless mobster’s girlfriend in his new show.
Vincent Pastore — a k a Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero of “The Sopranos” — is the mobster, and Brooks Ashmanskas will be hamming it up as the overeating leading man.
But the star turn will be Helen Sinclair, played so brilliantly in the ’94 movie by Dianne Wiest.
(“Two martinis please, very dry. Oh, you want one, too? Three.”)
The role is almost certain to earn whoever gets it a Tony nomination, maybe even the award itself.
The industry word-of-mouth on “Bullets Over Broadway” is excellent. The show begins previews in March at the St. James.
If it lives up to its hype, I bet it opens with an advance north of $15 million.
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Producer Roy Gabay suddenly has his hands on a very hot property: “Honeymoon in Vegas,” which opened to unexpectedly strong reviews last week at the Paper Mill Playhouse.
Moving it across the river should be a snap — except that every musical house is booked.
“Nobody saw this one coming,” says a theater owner. “We’d love to have it, but we have nothing available.”
Tony Danza waltzed away with glowing notices for his portrayal of Tommy Korman, a crook with a tender heart.
Which didn’t surprise me. Ever since I saw him play the bartender in “The Iceman Cometh” (with Kevin Spacey), I’ve always thought Danza was an underrated stage actor.
In “Vegas,” he sings, dances and plays the ukulele with effortless charm.
What surprised me were the raves for Jason Robert Brown’s score. In a column last week, I went after Brown and his contemporaries for their inability to write catchy melodies.
And then both the Times and The Post heaped praise on his “bright” and “bouncy” score.
The only way I see “Vegas” coming to town this season is if “Cinderella,” at the Broadway Theatre, falls off a cliff in January.
Short of that, “Vegas” will have to cool its heels until next season.
In the meantime, it’s at the Paper Mill Playhouse through Oct. 27, though tickets are going fast.