I’m here to relay a message from the Queen of Soul to the producers of the Tony-nominated “After Midnight.”
Aretha Franklin is interested in appearing in your show. She told me so herself Saturday at a dinner hosted by Clive Davis.
There is, however, one hitch: She’s not going to do eight performances a week. Three, yes, possibly four. But no more.
This makes things a little tricky, of course. A rule of thumb on Broadway is that the weekly profit is in the eighth performance.
The Brooks Atkinson would be packed to the gills when Franklin’s in the show. But the rest of the week might be a little light.
The only way around that is to find another diva of Franklin’s stature to alternate with her. That’s not easy, but I kicked the idea around with some friends in the music business, and we hit on . . . Diana Ross.
Sign those two ladies up, and I guarantee there won’t be a seat left at the show while they’re in it.
This scheme is not as far-fetched as it seems.
For one thing, Franklin saw “After Midnight” and loved it. Plus, she told me she’s always wanted to do a Broadway show. She even flirted, briefly, with playing Fela Kuti’s mother in “Fela!” a few years back.
Ross, too, has circled Broadway. At one point she was talking to the Nederlanders about doing a one-woman show along the lines of the legendary “Lena Horne: The Lady and Her Music.”
Gladys Knight, Patti LaBelle and Natalie Cole are each doing a stint in the show this summer, but the fall is wide open. Aretha and Diana: That’s the ticket!
Joan Rivers wants to set the record straight.
In a column last week about dueling Johnny Carson plays, I retold the story that Rivers fell out with Carson because she never told him she’d accepted a job hosting a rival late-night program.
“I called him!” Rivers told me. “But as soon as I started to tell him, he hung up.”
She called back and this time Carson’s wife, Alexis, answered.
The couple had just moved into an ultramodern, all-glass beach house in Malibu.
“I don’t think he’s here,” Alexis said.
“Take a look around,” Joan replied. “You’ve only got one room.”
Alexis put the phone down; a minute later it was disconnected.
“That’s the real story,” Rivers says. “And if I have to, I’ll dig up the phone records!”