For four years now, David Rabe has been trying to cast his four-character play ”Those the River Keeps” in a way that would make it viable for a Broadway production. Now it looks as though he`s about to give up, making the possible Broadway run of a major work by a major playwright a casualty of star-system economics.
The play is about a middle-aged man who, having married a much younger woman, is visited by a colleague from his shady past and must choose between current comfort and the allure of dangerous days gone by. The problem has been the two male leads, Phil and Sal, the casting demands of which ”are very, very particular,” in the words of the playwright.
”It needs two men who can play Italians in their 40s and who can act on stage,” Rabe said. ”You start adding in the demands of Broadway, the renown or fame they need, and the talent pool gets pretty small. There`s about four people who could do it.”
That assessment is actually a little bleak. Of the four Rabe named, Robert De Niro was never a realistic possibility, but Al Pacino, Danny Aiello and Harvey Keitel have all done readings of the play.
Their film commitments have kept them from signing on for a minimum six-month stint on stage. Joe Mantegna and Armand Assante have also been affiliated with the project at one time or another, but the producer, James B. Freydberg, said that as Rabe made changes in the play, the role of Phil emerged as central, and ”therefore it`s been more difficult to match two stars in it.”
Freydberg added: ”At one time, Joe Mantegna did a reading with Al Pacino. At one time it looked like it was going to be Joe and Aiello, but that didn`t work because Joe got a film.” Assante was interested in doing the play with Aiello, he said, but then it turned out that both of them wanted the same part.
The play`s one production, almost two years ago at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, N.J., featured Burt Young and Anthony LaPaglia, but because ”in some fashion Sal is the alter ego of Phil,” Freydberg said, the disparity in the actors` ages-Young was 50, LaPaglia 20 years younger-was an obvious flaw. Of the once-interested performers, Aiello remains so. ”I wanted to come back on Broadway,” Aiello said, ”but getting all the ducks in a row seems like an impossible thing. So David asked me if I`d be willing to do it Off Broadway. I said, `If it`s the right house.` ”
Now the problem is that Rabe and Freydberg are looking in another direction, committing to Off Broadway but casting two younger actors in the play-John Turturro is a name that has surfaced-which would leave Aiello, who is over 50, out of it.
”I think it`ll happen,” Freydberg said. ”But I don`t know when. We`ve got to rethink.”
– When Michael Rupert, who has since 1981 played Marvin, the lead character in various incarnations of ”Falsettos,” leaves the show in January to take on the Stephen Sondheim revue at the Manhattan Theater Club, the role will be filled by Mandy Patinkin.
Patinkin, a longtime friend of the show`s director, James Lapine, was on a concert tour recently in Toronto, where Lapine is directing a film. The offer to take over the role, Patinkin said, was made on a street corner after a serendipitous meeting.
Patinkin said that his contract for the show was open-ended and that his only other commitments were sporadic concert performances in the spring and a likely 10-week concert tour next fall.
– Country singer Larry Gatlin likes to tell a story about the days between the time he and his younger brothers first saw fame in the early 1970s and the time he finally quit drinking and taking drugs in 1984.
”In 1976 or 1978,” Gatlin said, ”when we started getting real hot, I was the cockiest young son of a buck. I was drinking a little too much vodka, and I took too many funny substances. Some of the guys at the music publishing company (Combine Music in Nashville) thought I was too big for my britches, and they were right.”
”A funny thing happened,” he said. ”At Combine, there`s a chalkboard in the men`s room in the basement. And on it somebody wrote a sign, in big capital letters, that said, `Will Rogers never met Larry Gatlin.` ”
The story is apropos because Gatlin, who has said that his touring days with his brothers, Steve and Rudy, with whom he has recorded 23 albums, will come to an end this month, has been named to replace Mac Davis in the title role of ”Will Rogers Follies,” beginning Feb. 16.
He has appeared as an actor a time or two on television, but never before on stage. Davis is leaving to resume his songwriting and performing career in Los Angeles, but he`ll stop in Pittsburgh and Charlotte, N.C., on his way home to stand in for a vacationing Keith Carradine in the ”Will Rogers” road production.
Gatlin auditioned for the part early this year and was the first choice of the producer, Pierre Cossette, to replace the original Will on Broadway, Carradine. Cossette said he had gone to Davis because Gatlin was unavailable until January.
In the sort of confluence that makes it seem as though celebrities were all born into the same large family, Cossette said he got the idea for casting Gatlin from the same source he got the idea to cast Marla Maples: Frank and Kathie Lee Gifford, who are friends of both Gatlin and Maples` former fiance, Donald Trump.
Gatlin, 44, who lives in Austin, Texas, spoke from a mobile phone there, where he was furniture shopping for the apartment he just bought in Trump Tower in New York. ”I like to say Donald made me an offer I didn`t understand, and I took it,” Gatlin said.
He said he felt no unease about appearing as an actor. ”I`m thankful for the past, for all the people we`ve sung for, from the little road houses to the White House-hey, that`s pretty good-and in between, but I feel like this is the next step for Larry Gatlin. I don`t think it`s a big stretch from Larry Gatlin, a Texan, to Will Rogers, an Oklahoman.”
