Ebersole turned on here is Margo’s charm. I’m not sure that the warm, nigh-maternal charm that Ms. Yet her performance on Thursday demonstrated that, even ailing, she can keep an audience not just on her side but in her lap. Ebersole is a protean performer of radiant affability. Bacall had become cast-in-marble sacred monsters by the time they played Margo. Ebersole, who in addition to being ill had to overcome the handicap of being less than perfectly cast. And the droll Mario Cantone, as Margo’s loyal hairdresser, reminded us that gay-is-cute characters did not begin with “Will and Grace.” Michael Park, as Margo’s director/lover, and Tom Hewitt, as her producer, are handsome ciphers.Ĭhip Zien (as a playwright) and Kate Burton (as Margo’s best friend) did what they could with lines that often arrived stillborn. Ebersole’s co-star in “Grey Gardens,” plays the perfidious Eve with a glowering intensity more appropriate to Lady Macbeth. Marshall was reduced to interpolating a scrapbook homage to previous Encores! productions, like “Chicago” and “The Boys From Syracuse.” A mistake, since you should never remind people of what they’re missing.Įrin Davie, the young actress who was Ms. The post-hippie urban style of 1970 comes across as so leadenly soggy that it’s beyond sending up.įor the big ensemble piece the title song, performed by a group of showbiz gypsies at Joe Allen’s, the theater watering hole Ms. (“You’re one of a kind, a fabulous bird, you’re out of your mind, and way out of sight.”)ĭirected by Kathleen Marshall, not at the top of her game, the Encores! performers largely seemed perplexed as to how to play this material and mostly wound up looking disengaged. Strouse’s melodies were inflected with a perishable disco beat, and Lee Adams’s lyrics were littered with aspiringly groovy slang. Though some of Mankiewicz’s stiletto-tipped zingers were retained, Comden and Green threw in a number of softer, matinee-crowd jokes. Though its creative team included fabled pros like Betty Comden and Adolph Green and the composer Charles Strouse (“Bye Bye Birdie”), “Applause” suffered from being transported to 1970, a time when Broadway was nobody’s idea of a hip place to be. The film is a triumphantly mannered edifice of jeweled epigrams and actorly hauteur, a gratifying fantasy portrait of the way sophisticated theater folk are supposed to talk and act. Mankiewicz and starring Bette Davis as Margo and Anne Baxter as her scheming, fame-hungry assistant, Eve Harrington. That’s “All About Eve,” of course, written and directed by Joseph L. Bacall at full wattage, it would have been obvious that the show was only a rhinestone imitation of its diamond-hard prototype. I saw “Applause” on my first trip to New York in 1971, and even to this green 16-year-old, it was clear that this show, which won the Tony for best musical in a lean year, was all about Lauren Bacall, who played the volcanic actress Margo Channing with such overwhelming presence that her froglike singing voice passed for a nightingale’s. Would she succumb to laryngitis before the evening’s end? What would she do about the notes that were sure to elude her? Could she convey the fiery love of performing that was her character’s and for that matter, the whole show’s reason to be?īefore I respond to these urgent questions (oh, all right, she was great), let me add that this production, which runs through Sunday, almost instantly answered the usual big question posed by the Encores! series of vintage American musicals: Is this a show that is more than a period piece, a work destined to outlast the era of its birth? I say, regretfully but emphatically, no. Her voice was not inaudible, but you could tell it hurt her to talk. And from the moment she set foot on the stage at City Center, feverishly aglow in red sequins, the suspense was sharp. Ebersole, who won a Tony last year for her astonishing work in the musical “Grey Gardens,” insisted on going on that night. In the indomitable style of the never-miss-a-performance Broadway diva she was portraying, Ms. If she hadn’t been, the evening would have forfeited its only excitement. Still, those who attended the Thursday night opening of the Encores! concert production of “Applause,” the less-than-classic backstage musical from 1970 based on the classic backstage movie “All About Eve” (1950), had reason to be grateful that its star, the remarkable Christine Ebersole, was seriously flu-ridden. Having the flu in February is the stuff that circles in hell are made of, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.
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