The man behind Center Stage was nowhere to be seen the other weekend when Columbia Pictures held a press junket in New York for its new dance movie. No,
Director Nicholas Hytner
and Ethan Stiefel
Photo: Barry Wetcher
TO AND STRO:
A director who missed almost all of her gala was Susan Stroman. The night her critically cheered Contact moved within Lincoln Center to the bigger, Broadway-qualifying Vivian Beaumont Theater, Stroman was stranded 13 blocks away in River City (i.e., at the Neil Simon, bracing for previews of The Music Man). "I seem to be the only member of the creative team here tonight," noted the lonely William Ivey Long, who designed the show's justifiably famous yellow dress. (The fact is, he designed a full dozen such dressed before he deemed the right one perfect, and Deborah Yates carries it beyond that.)
Meanwhile, Karen Ziemba, looking very much The Star in fire-engine red by Vera Wang and a motherlode of diamonds, somehow succeeded in lighting up Tavern on the Green (above and beyond her radiant smile) on the re-opening night. Finally, making a notable Broadway debut--and making it twice--is Jason Antoon, who many don't realize plays two roles in Contact: Ziemba's abusive husband in the second portion of the program, and the dance-club bartender in the third. The crucial difference between these wildly diverse performances, Antoon reveals, is "the gallons of gel that I have to wash out of my hair at intermission."
NEW FACES (AND FEET):
With Contact established and 
Photo: Barry Wetcher
Photo: Barry Wetcher
SLEEPING WITH THE ENEMY, AND ERRATA:
To date, the New York stage career of Melissa Errico has consisted of reprising the musical roles of Audrey Hepburn (My Fair Lady), Ava Gardner (One Touch of Venus) and Grace Kelly (High Society). Since these were hardly musical comedy icons, Errico has had to perpetuate her career elsewhere--like in the movies. The result is Frequency, opening April 28, and she's shockingly underused as Dennis Quaid's estranged daughter-in-law
After doing a bang-up job of directing The Drama Dept.'s sold-out revival of The Torch-Bearers, Dylan Baker has reverted to acting and gone to Vancouver for a film, Along Came a Spider: "Morgan Freeman plays this detective who's after a serial killer, and I'm another cop who's standing in his way, trying to get the same guy. Finally, he gets him--and I watch."
Ruth Williamson, who plays the mayor's wife in The Music Man recently went West for three days to "flirt" with Nicholas Cage. "We shot a couple of exteriors uptown in New York for Family Man, and I had to shoot an interior scene in L.A.," she explains. "I play a wealthy woman who flirts with him in his apartment building every morning in the elevator." The pencil-thin comedienne also has a cameo in the new ABC series Wonderland, airing Thursday, April 20, a week before The Music Man opens. The show takes place in a mental hospital, and Williamson is "guest psycho" for an episode called "The Raw and the Cooked." She is brought into the emergency room because she has poisoned herself eating ficus leaves. "I have all this inappropriate behavior--taking my clothes off, stuff like that--then they find out I have a degenerative brain disease. It's tragic and funny--and the hardest thing I've ever done."
