LET’S see: Your word of mouth is dreadful. Your star can’t re member his lines. Your director and his blogging sidekick have been hammered for cutting a famous dead author’s script as if it were sausage. And your company’s fretting that they’re woefully under-rehearsed.
What, if you’re a Broadway producer, do you do to avert disaster?
How about annoy the critics?
It’s an odd strategy to be sure, but that’s just what the genius producers of the troubled “The Country Girl” have managed to do this week.
Clifford Odets’ fine play, which is being directed by Mike Nichols and rewritten by noted blogger Jon Robin Baitz, opens Sunday night.
The rule of thumb on Broadway is that, for a Sunday opening, you invite the critics in on Wednesday or – at the very latest – Thursday. That way, they can file their review by Friday (to run in Monday’s paper) and get on with their weekend.
But “The Country Girl” is keeping the critics away until Friday, which is making these already cranky cobras even crankier. Several have called the press office to complain only to be told, “We’re sorry, but that’s what the producers have decided.”
“This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” one cobra hisses. “Usually they bend over backwards to get you in during the week. Well, f – – k ’em. I’m going to buy a ticket this week.”
No mystery why the critics are being kept at bay: Morgan Freeman, playing a washed-up old actor trying to make a comeback, is still struggling with his lines.
Backstage spies report that, just the other night, he delivered these whoppers:
* Odets’ line: “I only have two hands!”
Morgan the Mangler: “I only have two pairs of hands!”
* Odets’ line: “Do you know that Mabel Beck
makes more money than I do?”
Morgan the Mangler: “Do you know that Mabel Mercer makes more money than I do?”
The Mangler did himself no favors over the weekend, when he told the Times that theater is “too much work. Movies, you do a little work, make a lot of money and move on.”
Statements like that are what’s known as “cobra bait,” and all I can say is that Freeman better have a mongoose with him Friday night.
Also over the weekend, Variety’s Gordon Cox called the changes Baitz has made to Odets’ script “tweaks.” Listen, Coxy-Loxy: When you jettison an entire six-page scene from the first act, that is not a “tweak.” That is a “hatchet job.”
The scene was restored – but only after The Post came down on Baitz’s head.
News of Baitz’s butchery prompted an angry Marion McClinton, the fine director who has staged nearly all of August Wilson’s plays, to write the following, which I quote with his permission:
“O’Neill, Wilson, Williams, Miller and Odets, to name a few, have earned the right through their artistic merit to have their plays left the hell alone.
“Will the first revival of ‘August: Osage County’ or ‘Angels in America’ be trimmed down to 90 minutes because of a producer’s short attention span, a director’s arrogance, or a Hollywood star’s lost ability to learn lines and give a sustained performance without the aid of an editor? What’s next? The Reader’s Digest version of classic plays?
“Keep vigilant, Mr. Riedel. The horizon looms red. A bloody, dirt dull red.”
I am, Marion, I am.
And believe me when I say that I’ve got “The Country Girl” in my sights.