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The Risky Leap From Screen to Stage
IT was a makeover that set Hollywood drooling. In 1998 a movie actress who
was most famous for being the wife of Tom
Cruise took her first step onto a Broadway stage and was instantly
transformed into her own dazzling woman. O.K., maybe it wasn’t that simple. But
there’s no question that Nicole
Kidman’s professional life was kicked into a new, loftier orbit after she
starred in “The Blue Room,” David
Hare’s adaptation of “La Ronde.”
Before that, her film parts had leaned toward the decorative category of The
Girl (including one in a Batman movie). After, she was getting the kind of roles
that Meryl
Streep regularly landed: tormented characters with foreign accents and
Academy Award potential. Within a few years Ms. Kidman had been disencumbered of
Mr. Cruise and picked up an Oscar for playing Virginia
Woolf, if you please, in “The Hours.”
A decade later another Mrs. Tom Cruise (the third, to be exact) is making her
Broadway debut. That’s Katie
Holmes, whose supporting role in the revival of Arthur
Miller’s “All My Sons,” that of a true-blue hometown sweetheart with a
conflicted conscience, is modest compared with the five lustful characters
embodied by Ms. Kidman in “The Blue Room.” But it seems fair to imagine that Ms.
Holmes (another actress who appeared as The Girl in a Batman movie) is hoping
that at least some of the career-rejuvenating fairy dust Broadway sprinkled on
Ms. Kidman will fall upon her too. (“All My Sons,” also starring John
Lithgow, Dianne
Wiest and Patrick
Wilson, scheduled to open on Oct. 16 at the Gerald
Schoenfeld Theater.)
Broadway, it seems, has eclipsed Playboy as the place to make Hollywood pay
attention. There was a time when female movie stars who felt they were being
ignored by the industry took off their clothes for Hugh
Hefner’s magazine. Now they brush up their Shakespeare — or Schnitzler or Miller — and hit Gotham. Of course if you can manage to be
naked while appearing in a production with cultural cachet, as Ms. Kidman did,
then you’re really in business.
Ms. Holmes, as far as I know, is remaining fully dressed in “All My Sons.”
It’s Daniel
Radcliffe, the young actor who achieved international celebrity as the title
character in the Harry
Potter movie franchise, who bids fair to pull a Nicole this season. Mr.
Radcliffe will be doing the full monty in the revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus”
(also starring Richard Griffiths and set to open on Sept. 25 at the Broadhurst
Theater), a psychological melodrama with a certain literary heft.
The timing is most auspicious for Mr. Radcliffe, whose performance in “Equus”
in London garnered admiring reviews. The Potter series, after all, is nearing
its end. And while Mr. Radcliffe has yet to leave adolescence, he is probably as
tired of being The Boy (especially That Boy) as Ms. Holmes is of being The Girl.
They grow up so quickly these days.
I missed seeing Mr. Radcliffe in London, so I can’t personally vouch for his
stage chops, nor for those of Ms. Holmes. But I can predict with confidence that
another familiar movie face, Kristin
Scott Thomas, will seem right at home in Ian Rickson’s production of
Chekhov’s “Seagull,” which I caught (and loved) in London in 2006.
Ms. Scott Thomas, who is known to movie audiences for looking enigmatic and
patrician in films like “The English Patient,” may be making her Broadway debut
this season. But she has already proved her classic stage mettle in London with
arresting turns in Chekhov (“The Three Sisters” as well as “The Seagull”) and
Pirandello (“As You Desire Me”).
She is joined in “The Seagull” (to open on Oct. 1 at the Walter Kerr) by Peter
Sarsgaard, who in recent years has been cutting a cinematic swath with
movies that include “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Kinsey.” The first time I saw him,
though, was way off Broadway 12 years ago, when he was giving a blissfully funny
performance as a male variation on Blanche du Bois in the Drama Department’s
brilliant deconstruction of Tennessee
Williams’s “Kingdom of Earth.”
I am not nervous about the first Broadway outings of Ms. Scott Thomas, Mr.
Sarsgaard or, for that matter, Jeremy Piven, who will be appearing as a
foulmouthed studio executive in a revival of David
Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” (to open on Oct. 23 at the Ethel
Barrymore). Mr. Piven has of course had several years of practice
impersonating a dirty-talking Hollywood power player as the slimy über-agent in
the HBO series “Entourage.” But he also showed sturdy stage legs when he appeared Off
Broadway in 2004 in Neil
LaBute’s “Fat Pig.”
No, the Hollywood celebrity I’m really worried about is that big green lug
named Shrek, the popular animated movie hero who will be trying to effect the
transition from two to three dimensions (and from speech to song) when he
appears in the eponymously titled musical scheduled to open on Dec. 14 at the
Broadway Theater. Mr. Shrek (who will be channeled by the fine flesh-and-blood
actor Brian d’Arcy James) is famous for his crudeness, haplessness and general
gracelessness. So let me offer a friendly bit of advice to this likable ogre: If
you feel you’re losing ’em, pal, just shuck the
clothes.
