Last night I sat in another newly-refurbished jewel of a Broadway theatre (where, once again, the ongoing programme of renewal and maintenance puts the West End, Cameron Mackintosh’s theatres apart, utterly to shame), and watched a newly-refurbished jewel of a comedy, Boeing-Boeing, take flight again - even if, for the most part, it did not reach the same cruising altitude as it did on this production’s London opening night the February before last.
On that occasion, of course, we arrived at the Comedy Theatre with very little expectation, except a negative one: wasn’t this a hokey 60s sex comedy that was going to seem terribly dated?
I remember sitting behind Charles Spencer, and exchanging worried words about what we were about to be subjected to. Before long, both of us were laughing uproariously and so was the audience around us, caught up in wave upon wave of shared comic delight.
Now, of course, it has come to Broadway’s Longacre Theatre bearing a plane-load of expectation - and also wrestling with the memory of the fast flop that the play was when it was first produced on Broadway in 1965, and ran for less than a month, clocking up just 23 performances. But Matthew Warchus has freshly upgraded it from an economy class showing to one that is firmly in business class, or at least full of classy business.
There may be a bit too much busy-ness in some of the Broadway performances, though - notably Bradley Whitford as the triple-dating Bernard, which makes you realise how much more truthfully anchored Roger Allam was in the original London cast, and Christine Baranski can’t do deadpan as Frances de la Tour did as his maid Bertha, but equipping herself with a cod-French accent resorts to a lot of face pulling instead - but Broadway is at least being treated to the infinitely-resourceful comic triple threat of Mark Rylance, who continues to raise the stakes by under-playing the role of the friend from the country - here reconceived as hailing from Wisconsin - to reach blissful heights of panic.
There was an extra frisson to the sexual shenanigans last night, though, since Gina Gershon, playing Italian hostess Gabrielle, had just yesterday had her lawyers demand a retraction and correction from Vanity Fair to a story they had published that “outrageously insinuates that Ms. Gershon has had an inappropriate sexual relationship with President Clinton. This is absolutely false.”
In fact, her lawyers state that their client had “only been in the same room as President Clinton on three occasions, during which she was always in the presence of anywhere from approximately a dozen people to several hundred or more.” Perhaps there’s a farce to be written about celebrity contacts with the last Democrat president….
Meanwhile, Broadway royalty was also in the room last night - sitting at the other end of my row was leading actress Blythe Danner, whose daughter Gwyneth Paltrow is currently the face of Esteee Lauder, and was therefore also in the room, though not in person but as a full-page ad facing the title page of the Playbill for their latest product, Pure White Linen.
This is a city that is fuelled by celebrity, of course, and tasting their own piece of Broadway fame are a host of British Tony nominees. I’m doing a piece on four of them for this weekend’s Sunday Express, and yesterday I met two of them, Jenna Russell and Ben Daniels; and today I’m talking to two more, Mark Rylance and Daniel Evans. Only Mark has much of a public profile back at home, but here on Broadway all are being feted around town in the endless Tony-related events at this time of year, so they’re understandably having a ball. So am I.
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