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Post by Ace on Aug 5, 2003 22:11:24 GMT -5
Hmmm, and pretty much the reverse of PB's career, although he still has the face. ;D This SZ quote seems to imply one doesn't require experience or skill to do TV, just youth and a face... tsk tsk such theater snobbery. There's just so much less of a divide between theater/tv/film work in the UK, just look at actors like Dame Judi Dench who still do it all.
One of my favorite quotes about doing theater I read recently by a young British actor named Tom Hardy (another London Drama Centre student).
"You don't do theater to eat, you do theater to be eaten."
Inspired.
Ace
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Post by Ace on Aug 6, 2003 10:24:01 GMT -5
Yuliya has this article up at her site with much larger scans of these photos, but here it is (follow the link for 3 small color photos of SZ, one with PB from RS, two recent): www.townonline.com/arts_lifestyle/arts_lifestyle/art_feaazimbalistases07302003.htm'Romantique' notions By Alexander Stevens/ Staff Writer Wednesday, July 30, 2003 'Remington Steele' star Stephanie Zimbalist plays George Sand at ART Even if you were a devout fan of the 1980s TV show "Remington Steele," you might not recognize Stephanie Zimbalist today. She's grown out her hair and it's streaked with blonde highlights - a fashion statement that seems downright reckless compared with the dark, controlled tresses of Laura Holt, the button-down detective she played from 1982-'87. The appeal of Zimbalist's Laura was that she was both bright and beautiful, even if she realized that she needed a dashing male figurehead (Pierce Brosnan) in order to market her agency. "I have a lot in common with her. I have worked all my life in a profession which has been male-dominated," says Zimbalist. "I don't think she wanted to be controlled by men, which I totally understand because I'm that way." Zimbalist could be talking about Laura, the role that thrust her onto the national stage. But actually she's talking about her new role, the French writer George Sand, in "Romantique," Hershey Felder's new "imagination with music," playing Aug. 1-17 at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge. Zimbalist, 46, sits in her spacious dressing room at the Loeb, occasionally stretching her legs, yoga-style, while she chats. Nine color Polaroid pictures are wedged into the metal frame of her mirror - shots of friends (including her "boyfriend") and family (including her father, actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr.). Her affection for her dad is quickly apparent. When asked, she describes their relationship as "very close," and even takes time to pitch his soon-to-be-released autobiography. Zimbalist seems to share a no-nonsense quality with Laura Holt, but she tears up when asked about the protective, honoring way she seems to talk about her friends and mentors. Accessing those emotions will probably help her work in "Romantique," in which writer-director-actor-pianist Hershey Felder, the hero behind the hit "George Gershwin Alone," muses on the tantalizing friendship between composer Frederic Chopin (Felder), writer George Sand (Zimbalist) and painter Eugene Delacroix (Anthony Crivello). The play is set during one weekend in the summer of 1846, when Sand is about to present a new, largely autobiographical play, which is likely to cause waves within the relationships. Zimbalist says Sand's motivation is to let the men know that she's feeling lost. "Artists have large egos and large imaginations," says Zimbalist, describing how the dynamic that made the Chopin-Sand-Delacroix friendship so exciting was also what threatened the relationship. "And if you think of [those egos] as balloons that fill up, it's hard to fit them into one room. People feel pressure, some take up more space, and other people feel they're being crowded out. So it's about the expansion and release of artistic tension." That dynamic strikes to the heart of Sand - a nurturing, healing woman who had a knack for bringing together creative people. But she was also an artist in her own right. She may have nurtured Chopin through one of his most creative periods, but she also needed to express herself. The show may concentrate on three dynamic artists, but Zimbalist says the real star of "Romantique" is Chopin's music. "The music is the number one character in the play," she says. "The music carries any emotion that we want to express, need to express. It's very inspiring. It's evocative of the deepest wellings of the spirit." She gives the credit not only to Chopin but also to Felder. "Even if [the play] weren't going to be good - and it is [going to be good] - the fact that the actor who is playing Chopin can sit down and play Chopin beautifully, and does... that is so worth the price of the ticket, even if both Anthony and I were going to be lame." But Zimbalist aims higher than "lame." She says she finds herself fighting for Sand in the piece, trying to wedge as many facets of the writer into the play as possible. Sand was clearly an intellectually and emotionally complex woman - a prolific writer, and a passionate, even reckless, lover. But Zimbalist knows that Sand may get overshadowed by Chopin, pointing out that the production has an advisor who's a Chopin scholar, not one who's a Sand scholar. She says she fights, as best she can, for Sand. "There's no way to have it all," says Zimbalist. "But I want to make sure she gets up on stage." "Romantique" contains no singing - just the Chopin music - despite the fact that the cast is made up of three actors with strong voices. Zimbalist is a classically trained singer and actor. She studied at Juilliard, and like a long of list of other distinguished actors who studied at Juilliard, didn't graduate. Still, she admits she drops the Juilliard name because of the reaction it gets. "It's amazing what the Big J will do," she says. "Suddenly, you're not just a piece of crap television actress." Although "Remington Steele" was her highest profile turn on television, it wasn't her only one. She also appeared in dozens of TV movies. She embraces her 'Remington Steele' past, with only the smallest of reservations. "I am so grateful for it, because it made me solvent," she says. "That's such a hughly good thing. The only niche of a bad thing is that I can walk away from anything, because I don't need to do it. I mean, I don't live grandly at all, but I don't have to do [jobs] for the paycheck." After the success of "Remington Steele," Zimbalist got a couple of offers for TV series, but decided against them. "Only one that I turned down might have been a mistake - only for the bank account," she says. "Other than that, I made the right choices for myself." "Romantique" plays Aug. 1-17 at the Loeb Drama Center, in Cambridge. Tickets are $45. Call 617-547-8300. Ace
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Post by Ace on Aug 6, 2003 10:25:54 GMT -5
Boston Globe: www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/218/living/Timberlake_s_supreme_court_not_getting_Gigli_with_it+.shtmlPARTY ON ART Following the opening of ''Romantique'' the other night at the American Repertory Theatre, stars Hershey Felder (Chopin), Stephanie Zimbalist (George Sand), and Anthony Crivello (Eugene Delacroix) joined friends and well-wishers at Casablanca for a lively party. Guests included designer Kenneth Cole; WGBH radio host/producer Cathy Fuller; producers Peg McFeeley Golden and Nick Paleologos; former prime minister of Canada and wife of the playwright, Kim Campbell; director-producer Peter Medak; actress Dori Rosenthal; and Gip Hoppe of the Wellfleet Harbor Actors Theater. ================================ "director-producer Peter Medak"... formerly of RS Ace
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Post by curious george on Aug 6, 2003 13:22:58 GMT -5
And no one invited us? cg
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Post by Yuliya on Aug 6, 2003 17:02:12 GMT -5
They knew you wouldn't be able to make it.
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Post by curious george on Aug 6, 2003 19:52:43 GMT -5
You think I wouldn't have managed somehow if I'd gotten an invitation to a party with Stephanie Zimbalist?? I can limp really fast if need be. Getting over my, uh, lack of fondness for flying might be a slight impediment, but with the right incentive, I'm sure I could do it. cg
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Post by Yuliya on Aug 6, 2003 20:42:40 GMT -5
Excuses, excuses...
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Post by Yuliya on Aug 10, 2003 22:02:06 GMT -5
Felder stumbles as ChopinBoston Metro, Weekend, August 8-10, 2003 By Nick Dussault Musical magic gets spoiled by silly story After an immensely successful run in "George Gershwin Alone," playwright/actor Hershey Felder wasted no time getting behind the piano once again. Unfortunately, Felder's turn as Frederic Chopin in the world premiere of "Romantique" at the American Repertory Theatre pales in comparison to his Gershwin. In fact, Folder's Chopin could actually pass for Gershwin playing the part of Chopin in a tedious, poorly-written play about the great composer. He looks like Gershwin in a Chopin wig and he speaks like Gershwin trying to do a French accent, though not very well. His consumption-induced coughing spells are so contrived and amateurish that they're almost laughable. The show's only saving grace is that Felder spends a great deal of time seated at the piano playing Chopin. The gifted performer seductively captivates the audience with several extraordinary musical moments. Regrettably, the magic, is consistently spoiled by the silly banter that is the story of Chopin, author George Sand (Stephanie Zimbalist) and artist Eugene Delacroix (Anthony Crivello). The dialogue is trite, the direction borders on non-existent and the actors are so caught up in the grandiosity of their characters that they never bother to make them real. Completely devoid of human authenticity, these three caricatures spend 90 minutes spuriously spouting embarrassingly pedestrian lines such as Delacroix's, "If I stop creating art, I am likely to die." It's disappointing to think that these three great artists could have actually said so many silly, schmallzy things. Their lives and their stories had to be more interesting than this. Their work certainly was. ---------- The article with the picture can be found at here. And BTW, I updated my site and now there's a Romantique page, in case anyone's interested.
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Post by curious george on Aug 10, 2003 22:52:58 GMT -5
My. That's not quite as bad as our "favorite" movie reviews, but....!
cg
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Post by Yuliya on Aug 15, 2003 22:08:20 GMT -5
... not entirely untrue, although the reality isn't that bed, either. The critic is even more picky than I am. The post below is the same I'll post in a few other places, it'll be absolutely the same, so if you read one, you've read them all. Sorry for repeating myself, I don't think many olf us have a chance to see the play. ---------- OK, I've seen "Romantique" on Thursday and I'll try to summarize my thoughts. I'll probably fail. The following will probably have some spoilers but it's not a mystery, so in other words, if I were to go, I would still read this post. Consider yourself warned, though. The set was "framed" in a few painting frames, put slightly askew, and a few draperies hanging around them. Very apropriate, considering the events were narrated by Eugine Delacroix. I liked the set, the lighting, and the costumes. They were done in the same bluish-purplish color scheme and complimented the action nicely, and SZ's costume allowed for a quick change - she would wear a trousers with a vest, then disappear from the stage for a second, and come back wearing a skirt with the same vest, or vise versa. SZ wore a different hairdo from what we see in the pictures; it was what was worn in that era and what I think George Sand really wore - parted in the middle, down to cover her ears, and a bundle on the back of her head. It doesn't suit everybody but SZ looked good with it. It was a wig, of course. Mr. Felder is a fine piano player. It's a pity his writing skills could use some improvement. I can't say much about his acting skills as, aside from playing the piano, he has a very small part. Overall, I'd say Mr. Crivello, who played Delacroix, did it much better than the other two actors. Not that I'm surprised, though, because they don't give away Tonies as a consolation prize for lack of talent. The play could use some work, although all those lines critics picked at really don't sound half as bad within the context. But it could use some work to be more tight; it's falling apart. Music sometimes is necessary for the action, but sometimes only distracts from it. One of my absolutely favorite pieces was played in the background during a very important conversation between Sand and Delacroix; what was that dialogue about, please? Also, it doesn't help that, even the play is set during one weekend in Nohant at Sand's summer home, the action goes back to the past and returns to the future again. Even with Delacroix's narration, sometimes it's not clear when we're back, and that's where they could use not only some rewrites but another director as well. Or maybe they had one director too many. IMO, those jumps in time should be emphasized more, then they'd help to understand what's going on in Sand-Chopin relationship. And there're a lot of ways to do that - voices, intonation, even light, which was used for the part, but could be used more. Still, IMO, the biggest problem with the play is that it's hard to tell what it's about. I'm sure Mr. Felder had the point but he failed to deliver it. It's not about the creative process of three artists, although the subject is brought up - but not enough to be the pivotal element of the play. It's more how differences in creative process become just one more stumbling block in the deteriorating relationship between Sand and Chopin, but I don't think those differences were a problem when the relationship wasn't deteriorating. It is about their relationship when it's about to come to an end, but since the play is falling apart at times, it's hard to follow how it all started to deteriorate and why and really when, and while most of us know a thing too many about ending a relationship, in a play it should be a little more developed than that. Even if Delacroix leaves for Paris thinking the weekend had been a mess, the audience shouldn't get similar impression about the play. These problems, IMO, affected SZ's performance. I don't want to go into why that happened - deficiencies of the play, poor directing, her inability to see her acting from the side - it's not important and we'll never know the answer anyway. But sometimes it seemed she didn't know what she was supposed to play, especially when the three of them were reading a play Sand was writing - it started as innocent reading and ended as recital of their relationship and I don't think SZ really knew at what moment it was supposed to be an act on Sand's part and when it should've become serious. The scene had great potential and could've been a lot better. It could hardly be blamed on poor writing because I think it was really one of Sand's pieces. BTW, it looks like the best thing she could do as a writer was to keep Chopin alive - to put it mildly, his work outlived hers and for a reason. All that said, I'm not sorry I saw the play. In my book it was OK - OK to see, OK to miss. But I'm a picky theatergoer and have seen a lot of oh-my-god-am-I-glad-I-saw-this ones, besides, knowledge of Russian allows me to see the best stage actors from Moscow and St. Petersburg when they come to Boston (and the do come every now and then), so I'm hard to please and yet harder to impress. Basically, I got what I had expected after reading the reviews; maybe even a bit more because I had expected less - after reading them, I would've thought twice before buying a ticket. One thing struck me about SZ's voice - it was a lot lower than what I'm used to. And suited Sand's character much better, I must say. I wonder if anyone who have seen her on stage ever noticed that - in this or any other play. I don't know if she changed it to sound more in character (she sang a few lines and her voice didn't sound like it usually does when she sings, either; I would never said she had voice training, and maybe it was the point in that case), or it's her stage voice targeted to be heard in the last row, or maybe just altered by mikes. I even thought it was just her age - it can make it lower - but when I saw her after the play, her voice was back to normal. I have a thing about memorabilia signed in my presence (meaning I don't buy it nor do I bend over backwards to obtain it in any way other than waiting for a couple of minutes after a performance) so I waited after the play and asked the actors to sign the program. I must say SZ surprised me. They were all expected by some people they all knew about, so when I asked Mr. Felder and Mr. Crivello to sign the program, each of them took a few moments to do so, we maybe exchanged a few words, thanked each other and they went on to meet their company - which is exactly what I would have done in their place. SZ, when I approached her with the same request, smiled, nodded, but kept walking and happily greeted her friends. I stayed behind because I didn't know what I should do; then she turned around and said, "Come, come," and signed the program while talking, whether to me or to her friends, I don't know. Probably them, although she was talking about the picture in the program she was signing for me. Then we exchanged the same few polite words, I apologized for intruding, and left. I don't know why she did it that way; maybe it's what she normally does, or maybe they were mostly her friends whom she hadn't seen for too long and was anxious to greet. On one hand, it made me feel welcome, on the other - I felt I was rude imposing on her. She was very nice, though, so it wasn't her but the situation that made me feel uncomfortable. Well, anyway, that's as detailed I think I can, additional interrogation is welcome. She was wearing ponytail, her hair is dyed lighter than when she was playing Laura, longer, and untrimmed on the ends. She had gained more than a few pounds - not bad for a woman her age, but I doubt she can wear Laura's clothes anymore; well, maybe only if it's a shirtdress. And she does look her age, although she was still wearing stage make-up, which never looks good up close.
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Post by curious george on Aug 16, 2003 15:19:02 GMT -5
Thanks for the great details, Yuliya!! Yes, the various reviews sound like they were on target from your report, so I can see why it was "okay."
How nice to have gotten the autograph, even though the circumstances were awkward. Too bad.
cg
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Post by Yuliya on Sept 2, 2003 14:09:45 GMT -5
I updated my site (shameless site plug alert!) and among other things, there's a scan of Romantique theater program, maybe a few new pictures, and an article printed during filming of The Man in the Brown Suit.
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Post by Ace on Sept 2, 2003 16:47:30 GMT -5
Oooh cool.
Just read that interview. I've read it before but it's compulsive reading if just that everytime I read it I think hmmm... not exactly the most flattering interview.
Was going to say more but will stop self.... ;D
Ace
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Post by Yuliya on Sept 2, 2003 18:31:36 GMT -5
I know what you mean.
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Post by Myrtle Groggins on Sept 16, 2003 2:38:04 GMT -5
Very interesting reading. And the Pics thanks for the pics. I think I like her hair better when she played Laura ;D Wish I could see the play, bad reviews, bad wig and all. Thanks for being so thorough and thoughtful. And I don't like being a "Nomad" <---------- Guess I'll have to do lots more posting.
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Post by Yuliya on Sept 16, 2003 7:54:53 GMT -5
I didn't say the wig was bad. It as just different from the one in the pictures, and probably better, too.
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Post by Ace on Sept 16, 2003 17:07:35 GMT -5
Yuliya was much kinder than this review. ::OUCH:: Boston Phoenix
Art ache Romantique is a travesty BY CAROLYN CLAY www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/arts/theater/documents/03068615.asp Romantique By Hershey Felder. Music by Frédéric Chopin. Directed by Andrew J. Robinson and Joel Zwick. Set by Yael Pardess. Costumes by Michael D. Hannah. Lighting by Michael T. Gilliam. With Stephanie Zimbalist, Anthony Crivello, and Hershey Felder. Presented by the American Repertory Theatre at the Loeb Drama Center through August 17. CHOPIN WROTE DUETS? Hershey Felder and Stephanie Zimbalist team up for the E-major Étude. Nothing in the popular if hardly brilliant George Gershwin Alone prepares you for the dreadfulness of Romantique, Hershey Felder's new "imagination with music" centered on the more exalted composer Frédéric Chopin. Hey, you think, if Hugh Grant, more famous for Divine Brown than divine inspiration, can personate Chopin (as he did in the 1991 film Impromptu), anyone can. And unlike Grant, "actor, playwright, composer, and Steinway Concert Artist" Felder knows how to tickle the ivories. But Romantique, which is in its world-premiere production at the Loeb Drama Center, with Remington Steele star Stephanie Zimbalist as the writer (and Chopin's maternal squeeze) George Sand and Tony winner Anthony Crivello as the painter Eugène Delacroix, is like a stilted parody of a Romantic melodrama, almost every line a cliché. Delacroix, hoping Chopin will play a little something, remarks conversationally on "the divine moment when God takes control of your fingers and I can float to the stars." Sand accuses Chopin of "pouncing on me with your vicious mouth." And Chopin, in a flashback to a troubled night in Mallorca, follows a fevered rendition of the D-flat "Raindrop" Prélude with the claim that there is no rain in his music, "just tears in heaven, dropping on the page." With heightened twaddle like that excreting from the mouths of the three stars of the Romantic period on which Romantique lingers, we are left with the play's "fourth character," the beautiful piano repertoire of Chopin, in which Felder traffics at a richly draped Steinway but without particular insight. (If the play itself were not egregious, I'd vote for a drag production starring Dubravka Tomsic.) Felder's Gershwin show, a runaway Cambridge hit last summer that the ART reprised before doing this one, is a novel, workmanlike biographical piece filled with the jazzy sounds of its subject (including Rhapsody in Blue in its entirety). Felder, who also sings, renders that material more aggressively and less buoyantly than Gershwin but with polish. And the show provides interesting glimpses into the composer's musical idiom as well as into his short, egotistic life. Romantique, on the other hand, is just plain terrible. Set in 1846, it's narrated by Delacroix (both Sand's friend and Chopin's; his unfinished portrait of the couple, bisected after the artist's death, dominates Yael Pardess's lavish set), and it takes place during what was to be Chopin's last visit to Sand's country estate at Nohant. Both a valentine to the artistic sensibility and an anticipation of the painful break between Chopin and Sand that was to occur a year later, the work is pretentious and, even at 90 minutes, laborious. And it's not saved by Felder's execution of Chopin's piano music, ostensibly as the tubercular genius himself; though the author/actor/pianist, in a scene where Chopin is miffed, does whiz through the G-minor Prélude in impressive record time. In fact, Delacroix did spend two weeks in August 1846 at Nohant, where he enjoyed listening to Chopin play Beethoven. Here he's more like Nick and Honey showing up at George and Martha's in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? just in time to watch the host couple air their bruises. But there's none of Albee's corrosive passion on view in Romantique. Instead, amid Hallmark talk about Art, the argument between Sand and Chopin takes the stale form of a play-within-a-play, a dramatization of Sand's novel Lucrezia Floriani. After Delacroix flunks an acting test, Sand and Chopin play out a scene from the work, which many, including Delacroix, believed to betray the ill, dependent composer in an unflattering light, though Chopin himself appeared not to identify with the character of Prince Karol, who is a "sycophant" rather than an "artist." It is impossible to evaluate the performances in such a lame piece of dramatic writing; the best part of which is Delacroix's narrative summing up of the demise of the Chopin/Sand relationship, a sad coda played out against the Waltz in C-sharp minor. Crivello plays Delacroix, who's troubled by the tension between his friends, with knitted brow and hand poised behind back. There is some emotional truth to Zimbalist's striding Sand, primarily in her eyes, when she doesn't have to speak Felder's wooden, overdramatic dialogue (some of it lifted from Lucrezia Floriani). Felder is a sensitive, neurotic, if insufficiently ill Chopin. Maybe he'll get sicker when he reads the reviews. Ace
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Post by curious george on Sept 16, 2003 17:37:26 GMT -5
Yikes! That's some scathing review! cg
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Post by Myrtle Groggins on Sept 24, 2003 22:50:41 GMT -5
Above critic certainly doesn't believe "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all". If she did, her column would be a huge blank space.
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Post by Ace on Mar 25, 2004 17:58:17 GMT -5
The Times-PicayuneThe festival's opening night gala will be a reading of the seldom staged "The Two-Character Play," endlessly rewritten by Williams (another version exists called "Outcry") and a very personal statement about life, reality and art. Two actors, Felice and Clare, abandoned by their theater company and apparently trapped in an old theater, are playing brother and sister -- or are they actually brother and sister? Or two halves of a divided self? -- in a play-within-a-play as Williams examines themes that appear throughout his work. Stephanie Zimbalist and "Hairspray" star Joel Vig are Clare and Felice, while New Orleans' own Broadway star Bryan Batt reads Williams' stage directions. The Times-PicayuneWilliams Fest has a friend in Stephanie Thursday March 25, 2004 By David Cuthbert Theater writer Besides being an excellent actress at home in any medium, a child of Hollywood who's maybe two degrees of separation from anyone in the business and something of a cult figure from her years on "Remington Steele," Stephanie Zimbalist is a good friend to have in a pinch. Especially if you're The Tennessee Williams/New Orleans Literary Festival and one of your stars calls in sick a week before her reading at the fest's opening gala. "You know, it's funny," Zimbalist, "but I actually called the festival to see if there was anything I could do this year, because I love the Williams Festival. I love attending it as a participant, but I love being a spectator, too. The last time I was down there, I got to watch Richard Thomas rehearse his Tennessee piece, 'A Distant Country Called Youth,' with Steve Lawson directing. And I loved 'Roads Not Taken,' with scenes from the earliest versions of 'Streetcar' acted out and buying books by the authors who are there . . . "But the festival said, 'Sorry, we've got Tammy Grimes coming in to read 'The Two-Character' play with Joel Vig, who did 'Hairspray' on Broadway with my friend Linda Hart, who did 'A Perfect Analysis Given by a Parrot' with me at the festival. "But then, last Friday, the festival called up saying, 'Helllllp! Tammy Grimes is sick. Can you do the reading with Joel?' " One can imagine how many a star might react. But what Stephanie Zimbalist did was hop a plane to New York to rehearse with Vig, using the drive in from the airport to call and do some press for the show. Zimbalist, who was a wonderful Hannah Jelkes in a fest reading of Williams' "Night of the Iguana" a few years ago, is going to repeat the role "in a full production of 'Iguana' at the Rubicon Theater in Ventura, California; a co-production with the Winnipeg Theater Center, so we'll do it there, too." Rubicon is the theater where our own Lance Nichols will be playing opposite Michael Learned in 'Driving Miss Daisy' next month. "They attract all kinds of good actors there," Zimbalist said, "Linda Purl, Cliff DeYoung, Joe Spano. I did 'Dancing at Lughnasa' for them last spring and played Georges Sand in 'Romantique.' " It's TV for which she's best known, but her heart is on the stage. She recently did episodes of "Crossing Judson" and "Judging Amy," but she's more excited that she got to play Phyllis to her friend Teri Ralston's Sally in "a full-out production of 'Follies' at the California Conservatory of the Arts, with an incredible cast: John Raitt, Betty Garrett, Julie Wilson and Harvey Evans, who was in the original 'Follies'! I got to sing 'Could I Leave You?' and "Lucy and Jessie' and I was in heaven." Tonight at Le Petit, she'll be playing Clare to Vig's Felice in "The Two-Character Play," brother and sister actors whose theatrical troupe has deserted them, leaving them no choice but to perform "The Two-Character Play," which seems to contain elements of their lives. It's a fairly complex piece and when I spoke to her earlier this week, Zimbalist said she wasn't all that familiar with it. "But we'll pull it together," she said. "I didn't know the play before I did a reading of it eight months ago," Vig said. "It's wildly theatrical, sort of Noel Coward crossed with Samuel Beckett, it has a very peculiar, dark undercurrent. "There's a desperation to the characters as this mystery unfolds before the audience's eyes, all of us trying to piece together what's true and what's part of the play. It has humor, but it's the psychotic, black humor of people in absolutely desperate situations, so desperate it becomes funny to them. "It's also about fear. For instance, right now I'm in 'Hairspray,' the longest run of my career -- two years, so far. But there comes a point where you start thinking that theaters are, in the end, prisons for actors. To which Tennessee might have added, 'And playwrights, too.' " Vig has been working with a group called Food for Thought, which stages readings of plays at lunchtime at the National Arts Club in New York City. "You can have lunch and see a reading with well-known actors," he said. "Susan Charlotte, who's the director of Food for Thought, and a playwright, too, will also be at the festival, teaching a master class." Vig, who's done readings at the festival twice with his good friend Patricia Neal, is one of the busiest guys on Broadway. He understudies both Harvey Fierstein and Harve's stage husband, Dick Latessa in "Hairspray" and also plays six roles in the show. Recently, he played Latessa's role for a week. Is it hard adjusting from a huge theater like the 1,400-seat Neil Simon Theatre, to the 400-seat Le Petit? "No, I love Le Petit," Vig said. "It may be small, but it's a real theater. It looks like a theater, sounds like a theater, it even smells like a theater!" . . . . . . .
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