ACE FOR ANGELA
LEGENDARY LANSBURY IS RETURNING TO B'WAY IN TENNIS PLAY October 23, 2006 --
[IMG]
[/IMG]
LIGHT the candles. Get the ice out. Roll the rug up.
Angela Lansbury is returning to Broadway, The Post has learned ex clusively.
The four-time Tony Award-winning actress, whose celebrated performances in "Mame" and "Sweeney Todd" are the stuff of theater legend, will star opposite Marian Seldes in "Deuce," a new play by Terrence McNally about two retired women tennis players who once made up a championship doubles team.
Directed by Michael Blakemore ("Copenhagen," "Kiss Me, Kate"), the play will begin previews at the Music Box Theatre in April, with opening night slated for May 6.
"We all are floating around in the ether," Lansbury, 81, told The Post yesterday. "It's a wonderful gig we're embarking on here."
Said McNally: "I'm walking on Cloud Nine. I cannot wait for the first day of rehearsal."
From 1966, when, as Auntie Mame, she glided down an art deco staircase singing "It's Today," until 1979, when, as Mrs. Lovett, she merrily made meat pies out of Sweeney Todd's victims, Lansbury was the top female box-office draw on Broadway.
But in 1984, a year after appearing in an ill-fated revival of "Mame," she left New York for Los Angeles to play a mystery writer named Jessica Fletcher in what would become one of the most popular television series of all time: "Murder, She Wrote."
"Deuce" will be her first stage appearance in 23 years.
"After I bombed out [in "Mame"], my husband and I decided I needed to try something in television to establish a bit of an annuity for myself," Lansbury said. "I never closed the door on theater. I thought 'Murder, She Wrote' would run three years. It went 12 years. I got my annuity."
She also got famous the world over. To this day, she says, "people who speak in tongues I do not know chase me down Eighth Avenue calling out 'Jessica! Jessica!' The other day I was in the McGraw-Hill Building, and a man stopped me and asked, 'Are you still writing those mystery books?' "
Lansbury has been looking for a Broadway show since "Murder, She Wrote" went off the air in 1996. In 2000, she was going to star in "The Visit," a musical by McNally, John Kander and Fred Ebb, but had to withdraw from the production when her husband, Peter Shaw, became ill (he has since died).
Five years ago, McNally wrote a short play for her to perform at a charity event. It was about a legendary Broadway star returning to the theater after an absence of many years.
"She was really wonderful in that," McNally said. When he finished "Deuce" - an autumnal but very funny play about two women at the end of their lives trying to make sense of a professional partnership that brought them to the top of the tennis world - he sent it to her.
"Within 36 hours, I got a call: 'This is Angela. I've read the play and if you still want me to do it, I'd love to,' " he said.
Seldes, too, fell in love with the play the first time she read it.
"Listen, darling," she said yesterday, "Angela and I are playing two women our own age. But we are not in a nursing home, we are not being pushed around in wheelchairs, we do not have Alzheimer's. Most times, you open a new script, that is where you are. But it isn't what I want to go to the theater to see."
Blakemore, a two-time Tony Award-winning director, said the play deals with "the desire to excel, to compete, to win - even though you know loss is an inevitable part of life."
The original plan was to stage "Deuce" at the off-Broadway theater company Primary Stages, which has produced all of McNally's recent plays. But with Lansbury and Seldes, herself a Tony Award-winner, on board, Broadway was the place to go.
"Deuce" will be produced on Broadway by Scott Rudin and Tom Kirdahy in association with Primary Stages.
intervista di michael riedel del new york post
appena ho due minuti ve la traduco ,se volete!!!
