Michael Riedel

Michael Riedel

Theater

Broderick, Lane rule Broadway again with ‘It’s Only a Play’

The boys still have it!

Matthew Broderick and Nathan Lane, starring this fall in Terrence McNally’s “It’s Only a Play,” are still box office gold.

The revival, which opens Oct. 9, has already raked in $5.5 million — the top earner, so far, of the fall. The production teams Broderick and Lane for the first time since 2005, when they headlined a feeble revival of Neil Simon’s “The Odd Couple.”

They were Broadway’s reigning couple in 2001 in Mel Brooks’ smash “The Producers.” The day the show opened, the box office sold $3 million in tickets, a record that stood for two years until they rejoined the show in 2003 — and sold $3.5 million in a single day.

That $5.5 million is quite a haul for a non-musical, making Broderick and Lane members of a select club of performers whose names can sell out a show before opening night — Denzel Washington (“A Raisin in the Sun”), Daniel Craig (“Betrayal”), Julia Roberts (“Three Days of Rain”) and Hugh Jackman (“Back on Broadway”).

Jackman, by the way, has yet to hit Broderick-Lane levels with his show, “The River.” But it’s in a smaller theater (Circle in the Square) and the play, a London import, is obscure. Jackman will no doubt set box office records of his own once the season comes into sharper focus. He always does.

Jack O’Brien, who’s directing “It’s Only a Play,” has assembled an impressive group around Broderick and Lane. Megan Mullally plays a novice producer, eagerly awaiting the reviews of her first show. Stockard Channing plays the nutty diva. And F. Murray Abraham plays a waspish critic, modeled, some think, on John Simon.

Broderick is the playwright, and Lane plays his best friend, a bitchy TV star who has pointed words for, as Elaine Stritch used to say, “the theater and the charming people in it.”

“It’s Only a Play” premiered in 1982, so only a handful of people today would get all the many jabs at the theater people of the time. That’s why McNally spent the spring updating the script, adding what my sources say are “sharp and hilarious” pokes at the current crop of theater muckety-mucks. His targets this time include Harvey Fierstein, Jujamcyn chief Jordan Roth and his mother, Daryl (a producer), Rosie O’Donnell and Big Ben Brantley.

Yours truly comes in for a fair share of cracks, I’m told — most of them delivered by Lane, who even ad-libbed a few at a recent table reading.

It brings back fond memories of the e-mail exchanges we had when I had a go at “The Addams Family” during its out-of-town tryout. Lane responded: “Larry Gelbart once said, ‘If Hitler’s alive, I hope he’s out of town with a new musical.’ After reading your column, I feel Hitler might be working for the New York Post.”

Ha! Hit me with your best shots, Nathan.

But remember: I have a column. You don’t.