WHILE many of Broadway’s musicals are either shuttering or sputtering, plays – with movie stars as their headliners – are sprouting all over the Rialto.
The latest mushroom: Eugene Ionesco’s “Exit the King,” starring two Oscar winners, Geoffrey Rush (“Shine”) and Susan Sarandon (“Dead Man Walking”).
The two stars will be making their Broadway debuts in the production, which aims to open at the Barrymore in the spring, after “Speed-the-Plow” ends its limited run.
The production comes from Australia, where it received glowing reviews at the Belvoir St. Theatre in Sydney last year. I saw it and can report that Rush, as a king whose empire is crumbling, was brilliant.
POP VIDEO QUIZ: Hollywood Stars on Broadway
Clad in shabby pajamas, his face and hair white as a ghost, he looked like Marley without the chains. His tarnished crown appeared to be slipping from his head, and he wrapped himself in a ratty-looking purple robe.
At the start of the 1962 play, the monarch is dying. But King Berenger I isn’t giving up without a fight. As played by Rush, he flounced, pounced, danced, sang, pleaded, flirted, cajoled and raced around the stage, all in a desperate attempt to keep the Grim Reaper at bay.
It was all futile, of course – Death was not deterred – but it was hilarious until the end, when the play becomes downright tragic.
As Ionesco, who died in 1994, said of “Exit the King”: “I told myself that one could learn to die, that I could learn to die, that one can also help other people to die. This seems to me the most important thing we can do, since we’re all of us dying men who refuse to die. The play is an attempt at an apprenticeship in dying.”
Trying to shove the king into his grave is his wife, Queen Marguerite. She’s a nasty piece of work but must be a fun role to play, and I bet Sarandon makes the most of it.
Another juicy part, yet to be cast, is that of the king’s doctor, who has the bedside manner of Jack Kevorkian. “Exit the King,” which will be staged by Neil Armfield, Australia’s foremost theater director, will play a limited 20-week engagement.
It is not to be missed.
Also “unmissable,” as a British theater critic might say, is Alan Ayckbourn‘s magnificent comic trilogy “The Norman Conquests,” which will likely open at Circle in the Square in the fall.
This production, directed by Matthew Warchus, comes to New York by way of Kevin Spacey‘s Old Vic in London, where it’s been a sellout for months.
The three plays, which à la Tom Stoppard‘s “The Coast of Utopia” can be seen separately or in a full-day marathon (the best way, I think, to experience them), center on a sexually omnivorous librarian, Norman. Over the course of a weekend, Norman manages to seduce his sister-in-law, his brother-in-law’s wife and, in the end, his own estranged wife.
Each play is set in a different part of the same house and examines the same events from different angles.
As Charles Spencer, critic for the Daily Telegraph, noted: “The play is an enthralling detective story, with the audience in the role of Poirot, piecing the puzzle together.”
The Old Vic cast will be making the trip to New York, so we’ll have a chance to see such dazzling British actors as Stephen Mangan (Norman), Jessica Hynes and Ben Miles.
SOME sad news: Father Joseph Kelly, for years a fixture at St. Malachy’s, the actors’ church, died over the weekend. He was 77.
A warm and witty man, Father Kelly loved the theater and everybody in it. He was a regular first-nighter, always praying for a hit.
Father Kelly often described the West 49th Street church as a show “that’s been running for over 100 years with a star who’s 2,000 years old.”
Over the years, he ministered to such stars as Antonio Banderas, Melanie Griffith and Brian Dennehy, all of whom frequently stopped by to light candles before their shows.