Loose Lips

In a world where theater transfers often take many months, if not years, it’s remarkable that Naked Angels has been able to move Stephen Belber‘s new play Fault Lines — about a disastrous boys’ night out — into the Cherry Lane Theatre just a few weeks after an initial staged reading at Vassar College’s Powerhouse Theater, with its original four-person cast intact. “It was something we all really liked doing — I haven’t had that much fun on stage in a long time,” explains Josh Lucas, who appears alongside Noah Emmerich, Dominic Fumusa, and Jennifer Mudge in the show. And we thought that the audiences who saw it up there really enjoyed it, and we all had the time. I think one of the reasons we all wanted to continue with the show, as well, is there’s no alpha in the group, which can happen when you have three men on stage. We’re not trying to outdo each other.”

Aside from the cast, it’s the text that appeals to Lucas, who appeared on Broadway as The Gentlemen Caller in the recent Broadway revival of The Glass Menagerie. “What I love about this play is that it’s 85-minutes long; it takes place in a real-time, one location environment, and tells the story so compactly,” says Lucas. “It goes from being wildly funny to very dark, and it deals with some very interesting issues that many of my friends are dealing with at this point in their lives. I also love being Off-Broadway because I feel like the creative tension is less driven by the need for profit than Broadway is. It’s much more about a group of people coming together and doing it for the words and the audience and the experience of being up there, which is also the way I felt about doing Spalding Gray: Stories Left to Tell. Then again, I was saying to my girlfriend — who works in a bar — that she makes more in one night than I’m making in a week.”

Lucas also credits a great deal of the positive experience with this show to its rather famous director, David Schwimmer. “Of course, it helps that he understands acting, but what more fascinates me about David is the he comes from the school of the great television director James Burrows, who I also worked with on Will & Grace, and he’s really learned from him” he says. “David has this very quick, very gentle, yet very firm hand, and he’s really capable of massing you toward what he wants, while understanding your process as an actor. And he knows how to direct quickly, so that putting on a play doesn’t have to be this really indulgent process, which sometimes I find it can be.”

Lucas acknowledges that living in New York has perhaps made him less desirable in Hollywood — where his hit movies have included Sweet Home Alabama and Glory Road — but he isn’t lacking for interesting film work. “I recently did Tell-Tale for Michael Cuesta, which is a modern version of the Edgar Allan Poe story. I play this man who gets a heart transplant and then the heart starts demanding that he take charge of the men who killed its original owner. It’s what I would call an artistic horror film,” he says. “And I’m going to do this great project here in New York with Tim Robbins called Possible Side Effects, which takes on the pharmaceutical industry. I’m really excited about it.”

WHO’S ON THIRD?
“I kept reading interviews with playwrights who were working with regional theaters and how nurturing they are, so I thought it was something I should try,” says New York stalwart Charles Busch in explaining how The Third Story, his first new play in many years, ended up making its world premiere at the La Jolla Playhouse. “And it’s been great to be in an environment where I know this isn’t my only shot at the play, even if I don’t know where our next stop might be.”

A far more complex piece than such Busch comedies as Shanghai Moon or Die Mommie Die!, the play interweaves three different stories: a realistic tale of a mother-son screenwriting team in the 1940s, a B-movie parody about the alliance between a mob queen and lady scientist, and a Russian fairy tale about a princess and a witch. “I’m one of those people who get an idea every day, and about 99 percent of them stay in my computer forever,” he says. “With this play, I started out thinking about a piece about a lady crime boss, but I realized I didn’t want to write that, because it would come out as a simple spoof or an extended episode of The Sopranos. So I was looking through my computer, and I found about 50 pages of a play I started 10 years ago about a lady scientist who can do cloning, and so I put them together. But then I realized I wanted to move on from just parody, so I added this naturalistic story about the screenwriters — and then I thought just to make things more complicated and interesting, I’d write this fairy tale and see how they could reflect on each other.”

Busch appears in only two of the segments, as the mob queen and the witch. “I couldn’t do all three stories, there’s no way to change dresses fast enough. And during rehearsals, I was tempted to recast my parts; I kept thinking I don’t want to learn all this new dialogue,” he says. Fortunately, he had longtime colleague and director Carl Andress on his team. “Carl is such a marvelous dramaturg that I use him as a sounding board even on projects where he’s not involved. But it’s also great that he knows me so well that he could tell the people in the show who don’t know me that the most important thing is that I’m happy with my wig.”

Indeed, Busch is working with a new group of co-stars, including Mary Beth Peil, Scott Parkinson, and real-life couple Jonathan Walker and Jennifer Van Dyck. “They can wipe the floor with me as an actor. And that’s good, because this is a different piece than my other shows; it’s not a star vehicle,” he says. “Still, I do get the nicest clothes — I think have six costume changes — and that was a little embarrassing at first, since Mary Beth gets one costume for the whole show. But honestly, I’ve never been an ensemble person, though I really am trying.”

STARRY STARRY NIGHTS

Dianne Reeves, Dee Dee Bridgewater and Kurt Elling will be among the performers at Jazz for Obama on October 1 at the 92nd Street Y; playwright Theresa Rebeck and author and journalist Leonard Jacobs will appear at the Drama Book Shop on October 2 and 7, respectively; Susan Miller will bring her Obie Award-winning show My Left Breast to the McGinn/Cazale Theatre, October 3-5; Bernadette Peters will headline the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Spotlight Gala on October 4; Choreographer Christopher Wheeldon will hold an open dress rehearsal with his Morphoses company at noon on October 5 at City Center; Tony Award nominee Euan Morton will perform Stranger in a Strange Land at the Metropolitan Room, October 5, 12, and 19; Sandra Bernhard will perform at the Ali Forney Center’s benefit A Place at the Table at the Chelsea Art Museum on October 6; the same night, Broadway stars Alison Fraser and Carolyn McCormick will star in a reading of Vita & Virginia at the Grolier Club; Carolee Carmello, Marin Mazzie, and Donna Murphy will be among the stars honoring the Shubert Organization’s Gerald Schoenfled at the Broadway League Gala at the Waldorf-Astoria.

Looking ahead, Emmy Award winner Alec Baldwin will narrate the New York Philharmonic’s Inside the Music concert at Avery Fisher Hall on October 10; that same evening, Betty Buckley will perform at the Doug Varone and Company Benefit at the Hudson Theatre; Chita Rivera, Marge Champion, Dana Moore and Dick Cavett will participate in Dancers Over 40’s program Jack Cole: Alive and Kicking at Symphony Space’s Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater on October 13; country music superstars Emmylou Harris, Vince Gill, and Rodney Crowell will perform on October 15 at the Nokia Theatre as part of the All for the Hall New York benefit for the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum; the same night, Stephen Colbert, David Rakoff, and Aasif Mandvi will participate in Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts series; Stanley Tucci and Judy Collins will be honored on October 16 at the Emelin Theatre’s 2008 Gala at the Glen Island Harbour Club in New Rochelle; author David Kaufman will discuss his new book Doris Day: The Untold Story of the Girl Next Door on October 21 at Borders Park Avenue; and Bill Irwin, Andre DeShields and Heather MacRae will participate in the Workshop Theatre Company’s Vaudeville Nouveau benefit at the Zipper Factory on October 27.

Meanwhile, taking a backward glance, Passing Strange co-stars de’Adre Aziza and Chad Goodridge attended the September 12 performance of Nicky Silver’s Three Changes at Playwrights Horizons; while the audience at the September 14 opening of the aptly-named The Marvelous Wonderettes included Rosie and Kelli O’Donnell, Liz Larsen, and Liz McCartney. (FYI: The group will be appear at Splash at midnight on Monday, September 29). The September 17 opening of Forbidden Broadway Goes to Rehab, the reportedly-last edition of Gerard Alessandrini‘s long-running series, brought out such pals as Mo Rocca, Brian O’Brien, Christine Pedi, Julie Wilson, Tom Hewitt, and David Zippel; Michael Cumpsty and Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis — not with each other — were at the September 23 performance of Equus; and Regis Philbin led the applause at at the September 24 show of Nikki Blonsky‘s adorable cabaret show, Coming Home, at Feinstein’s at the Loews Regency. (The pair will be performing together in Atlantic City on October 25.)

HE LOVES DESI
Actor-singer Greg Purnhagen doesn’t believe Desi Arnaz has ever gotten the credited he deserved, which is one reason he developed Babalu-cy!, now playing at the Actor’s Temple. “Actually, the idea of the show came out of two origins,” says Purnhagen. “One is that I am Cuban by birth, but I was adopted and grew up among Italian-Americans in Long Island, and Desi was my template for what it means to be Cuban. I always thought of him as a surrogate relative.”

And origin number two? “As a kid, I watched every episode of I Love Lucy and I knew every song he sang. So when I decided to come back to the world of cabaret last year, I started to think about Desi and in doing research, I found out more about his life before marrying Lucille Ball and his career as a bandleader. A lot of people don’t realize how instrumental he was in creating the Conga craze, for instance.”

Since its debut as a cabaret show at the Metropolitan Room last year, the work has been reshaped and now includes more book scenes and a larger focus on his marriage to Ball (played by Emily Anne Smith). And while Arnaz’s family has yet to see the show, he’s been in correspondence with daughter Lucie Arnaz, who has encouraged Purnhagen on his theatrical journey. “Desi allowed himself to be overshadowed by his wife intentionally on the TV show, but I want people to really know how talented he was,” he notes. “And let’s face it, getting to sing ‘The Straw Hat Song’ and ‘Babalu’ on stage is an absolute blast.”