I am happy to report that two of this city’s most engaging theatrical attractions are alive and kicking, despite the vicissitudes of time and the economics of the theater.
One is the actor, impresario and prim half of TV’s “Odd Couple,” Tony Randall, who turns 84 in February and is the only actor I know of who has worked in romantic comedies with Marilyn Monroe (“Let’s Make Love,” 1960) and Renee Zellweger (“Down With Love,” 2003).
The other is Randall’s National Actors Theatre, which he founded 12 years ago as something of a U.S. answer to Laurence Olivier’s legendary National Theatre in London. The NAT’s demise has been routinely predicted ever since, and it has had to move like a gypsy from New York’s Belasco Theatre to the Lyceum to the O’Neill to the Court, but it’s now in a new and permanent home at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts in Lower Manhattan.
In the action
Randall and his theater are kicking in unison these days as he’s one of the cast members of its latest production, Luigi Pirandello’s cryptic comedy of ridicule “Right You Are.”
“Pirandello is internationally celebrated, a Nobel Prize winner, but almost unknown in America,” Randall said in an interview the other day in his West Side apartment that occupies an entire floor on Central Park West. “It’s a new play for everyone. When we did `Timon of Athens,’ Shakespeare’s least known play, most people said, `Who wrote it?'”
Surviving in a New York theatrical milieu that now runs largely to Disney musicals and creaky revivals, Randall sees the mission of his enterprise as one of preserving through performance such classics, no matter how obscure.
“The National [Actor’s] Theatre is a museum,” he said. “It must be. People have to learn what history is.”
Though he got his big break on the 1950s TV comedy “Mr. Peepers” and gained movie stardom playing foil to Doris Day and Rock Hudson in such fluffy comedies as “Pillow Talk,” the Oklahoma-born Randall worships the classics as much as he famously does Grand Opera.
Earlier this year, he and NAT staged the oldest known play in history — Aeschylus’ “The Persians,” with veteran Broadway lead Len Cariou.
“It was dynamite,” Randall said. “It was written in 456 B.C., but it was the most anti-Bush play you could find. It was so timely. It hit like a blow to the belly. It attacked so scornfully the hubris of those who make war, it was as though it was written with George Bush in mind.”
Last year, they packed houses and won kudos from even the harshest critics with a dazzling production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui,” a parable of Hitler’s rise to power set in gangster-era Chicago.
It helped that his cast included Al Pacino, John Goodman, Chazz Palminteri, Steve Buscemi, Billy Crudup and Charles Durning. And Randall, who won raves for his comic turn as a drunken actor.
For all concerned, it was a labor of love.
“I only pay my actors $700 a week,” Randall confessed.
Making ends meet
Calling the survival of his theater “a struggle” — made possible only by donations from Amex and other corporations, with little help from the government — Randall was amused by the complaints of his counterparts abroad.
“I was in Richard Ayres’ office when he was managing the [London] National],” Randall said. “We were comparing our problems. When he mentioned that he got 22 million pounds per year from the government, and that he had been cut back to that by that terrible woman, Margaret Thatcher, I realized we had nothing in common to talk about. If I had 22 million pounds a year . . .”
Without government help, quality theater in New York has just become too expensive, he said.
“They can only afford to put on shows for tourists,” he said. “Tourists don’t care about quality as long as they can see a show. That’s why you’ve had `Cats’ running for 12 years.”
The troubles of running a major theater company in hard times aside, life continues to be very good for Randall. His art-filled apartment has sweeping views of Central Park to the east and the full Midtown Manhattan skyline to the south. It’s so meticulously neat as to seem the dream home of Felix, the prim character he played (and still occasionally plays) in “The Odd Couple.”
His first wife, Florence, died in 1992. In 1995, he married the beautiful, blond and then 25-year-old actress and theatrical intern Heather Harlan. They have two children, Jefferson Salvini Randall, 5, and Julia Laurette Randall, 6.
“My son wants to be a policeman,” he said. “My daughter is already showing signs of coming into the theater.”
What was Marilyn Monroe like to work with? “A Pain. She got to work at 5 o’clock in the afternoon.”
And Doris Day? “Terrific. She was bright and a total professional.”
Fond memories
Looking back, his own favorite roles were, on Broadway, Rene Gallimard in “M Butterfly,” the French diplomat who falls in love with a Chinese lady opera star who turns out to be a male transvestite; and, on television, Sidney Shore in “Love, Sidney,” the then controversial series about a middle-age homosexual artist who takes in a single mother and her daughter.
But Randall does not dwell in the past. Next year, he’d like to stage “The Tresses of Absalom,” after the poem “Absalom” by Nathaniel Parker Willis about the son of King David.
What keeps this extraordinary man going?
“I love to act,” he said, needing to say nothing more.
