Everything is Rosie (and Joey) at Frankie and Johnny

Continuing the picking of plum Broadway roles by cast members of the HBO series The Sopranos, Joe Pantoliano will take over as Johnny in the revival of Terrence McNally’s Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune on New Year’s Day. Starring opposite him as Frankie in the two-hander will be Rosie Perez, who received an Academy Award nomination in 1993 for her role in Fearless. The actors are replacing the original stars of the revival, Stanley Tucci and Edie Falco (the latter also well known for her work on The Sopranos).

Pantoliano’s character on the HBO series, Ralph Cifaretto, was recently “whacked.” With his role in Frankie and Johnny, he joins fellow Sopranos actors Lorraine Bracco (who replaced Kathleen Turner in The Graduate) and Jamie-Lynn Sigler (the latest Belle in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast) on Broadway. Born in Hoboken, Pantoliano began his professional career in 1972 as Billy Bibbit in a tour of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and appeared frequently Off-Broadway and in regional theater before moving to Hollywood in 1976. Among his most notable film credits are Risky Business, The Goonies, Empire of the Sun, Midnight Run, The Fugitive, The Matrix, and Memento. While working in movies, he returned to the stage in Los Angeles, winning a Dramalogue Award and a Drama Critic’s Circle Award as Best Actor in Orphans and a second Dramalogue Award as Best Actor for Italian American Reconciliation.

Perez, who was born in Brooklyn, made her film debut in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. Often humorously caricatured for her nasal voice and her thick Latina accent, she might have been thought an unlikely prospect for stage work, but she won a Theatre World Award for her performance in References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot at the Public Theater last season and has been pursuing other theater projects; on November 24, she will appear in a staged reading of the new Melissa James Gibson play Brooklyn Bridge at the National Arts Club. Perez’s most recent films include Human Nature, Riding in Cars With Boys, King of the Jungle, and The Road to El Dorado.

Both Perez and Pantoliano will be making their Broadway debuts in Frankie and Johnny. Directed by Joe Mantello, the show opened at the Belasco on August 8. In his review of the production, David Finkle wrote that “Desperation and depression are two states of mind that don’t frequently provoke the tenderness Terrence McNally brings to Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune” and noted that, “in a season where more frontal nudity is promised (cf. Richard Greenberg’s incoming Take Me Out), McNally uses the fact that his characters literally let it all hang out as a metaphor for how the two of them figuratively let their feelings hang out.”