The new Chelsea Stage is taking the bad with the good.
Its new the ”March on Russia” got good reviews. Last week`s theft of office equipment, including computers with mailing and grants lists, neither of which had backups, is bad.
Geoffrey Sherman, the artistic director, says he`s counting on board members like Kathleen Turner and Geraldine Fitzgerald for help.
– The opening of ”Grotesque Love Songs” at the WPA Theater was delayed by the dismissal of Sally Kirkland, the Oscar nominee who was to co-star in the Don Nigro play with Felicity Huffman and Chad Lowe.
Kirkland was let go last week after stopping a preview performance seven minutes into it and demanding that it begin again.
A company member says, ”She turned her back to the audience and said,
`I`m going to do something I`ve never done before. Stop and start all over again.` She was onstage with Felicity Huffman and she just walked off. The audience was stunned.”
Where was Kenneth Elliott, the director?
”I left and went to the bar next door,” he says. ”I didn`t find it odd. I guess I was expecting it. I had heard she was a little eccentric.”
Elliott says that he and Kyle Renick, the WPA artistic director, made ”a mutual decision” about Kirkland`s dismissal, replacing her with Suzanne Collins.
It seems that it was Kirkland`s devotion to Method acting-experiencing the moment, seemingly to the exclusion of all else-that upset Renick. ”It may take another generation of American actors to completely recover from the excesses of the Method,” he says. ”Lee Strasberg has a lot to answer for at the Day of Judgment.”
Kirkland says: ”I had been having trouble all along with the opening beat of the play. Ken Elliott saw it as high comedy; I felt rushed. I wanted eye contact. You can call that Method acting. To me, that`s good acting.”
As for stopping the show, she says, ”We had just been given cuts and there was a wheelbarrow with six bags of fertilizer onstage that fell over by accident. It became a scene about a wheelbarrow and fertilizer. So I did the cuts but went up on my line. I turned my back on the audience and mouthed
`help me` to Felicity, but she didn`t do anything. I apologized to the cast later and brought them flowers. It never occurred to me it would become such a monster to management, because I`d been getting incredible response from the audiences.”
Still, she says, ”I appreciate everyone`s position. The last thing I wanted was for something to go wrong.” I did my best and I was surprised. But that was their prerogative.”
– During Equity Fights AIDS Week this week, every Broadway and off-Broadway show is helping raise some money.
One of the more original efforts comes from Broadway. The company of
”Lettice and Lovage” has printed a cookbook titled ”Hedgehogs, Puffins and Coneys,” taking its name from one of Lettice Douffet`s tour-guide speeches in the play. For $10, you get Maggie Smith`s recipe for orange marmalade and, for those with more particular cravings, Margaret Tyzack`s for baked parsnips.
– Remember the New Musicals program at the State University of New York at Purchase, which produced ”The Kiss of the Spider Woman” and folded because of a lack of funds?
Well, it may be gone, but it`s not forgotten. Its former executive director, Marty Bell, has been trying hard to hold on to the rights to ”My Favorite Year,” a musical adaptation of the movie with Peter O`Toole and Mark Linn Baker.
In fact, he has reportedly told the show`s creators-Stephen Flaherty, Lynn Ahrens and Joseph Dougherty-that New Musicals will not relinquish the rights to the film without being paid a substantial fee.
One participant in the negotiations says Bell ”wants the world,” adding that Bell claims that whatever money he`s paid will go back to New Musicals investors. But one investor reached last week said he knew nothing about such an arrangement.
Flaherty and Ahrens, who wrote the Broadway hit ”Once on This Island,”
and Dougherty, an Emmy-winning writer on television`s ”thirtysomething,”
started work on the music, lyrics and book, respectively, under New Musical`s aegis.
Bell had obtained the rights to the film and separate rights to its screenplay from Turner Broadcasting System.
Although it`s not surprising that New Musicals wants to be paid for the rights themselves, those on the opposite side of the negotiating table take exception to the insistence on a fee for ”development” costs because the show is still not finished. What`s more, they say the organization has no right to participate in the show`s future profits.
Accordingly, the show`s creators have stopped all work on the piece until things are settled.
Although Bell did not return calls made to his home, his attorney, David Hollander, says, ”In any negotiation, the side who makes a proposal is always told that it`s too high.”
