Word: bialystock
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...three-year Broadway run has raked in $193 million and won a record 12 Tony awards. With opening night set for Nov. 9 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, posters and playbills were printed up headlining Richard Dreyfuss, who would be taking the leading role in London as Max Bialystock, a shyster showman who puts on a surefire flop so the tax collectors will never spot that it was designed to bilk hordes of investors. But just days before the American import was set to begin previews last Friday, Dreyfuss seemed to be drawing a little too much inspiration from...
...Nathan Lane Broadway?s greatest star ever? You could make the argument. With him hamming it up as theatrical impresario Max Bialystock, The Producers is a sellout smash; with anybody else in the role, it?s just another struggling Broadway musical. If he takes a liking to a project - a revival of Butley, say, which he starred in last year in Boston - it is immediately eyed as a possible candidate for Broadway. And if he wants to revive a little-known Stephen Sondheim musical - and not just star in it, but rewrite the thing too - darned...
...first instance was when Henry Goodman, the British actor named last month to replace Nathan Lane as star of the hit musical The Producers, was suddenly fired. Not funny enough, the (small p) producers had ruled. For the new Max Bialystock, they tapped Brad Oscar, Lane's longtime understudy in the part. Oscar won a Tony nomination in the role of Franz, the Nazi author of Springtime for Hitler--a role he stepped into in Chicago when the original actor was sidelined by knee surgery. Oscar told a reporter last week, "I still can't believe it's my life...
Goodman is handling the pressure nicely. "You've got to think, 'Stuff it, here I go,'" he says. "It's a hugely grueling part. Bialystock drives a lot of the show, he's rarely offstage." A veteran of four American musicals, including Chicago in London, he is a champion of those Broadway belters. "If ever there was a time when people needed to laugh and relax, its now," he insists. "The Producers provides some balance to today's tensions. It's wonderfully offensive to all creeds!" He bristles at the suggestion that musicals are all fluff. "Not merely escapism. Escapism...
...perhaps the most humbling giant step of his career, one that may finally make people stop asking, "Henry who?" Q&A TIME: There was talk after Shylock of your doing Fiddler on the Roof, but you were reluctant to be typecast as a Jewish actor. So why Bialystock, a very Jewish role? GOODMAN: I want to celebrate being a Jewish actor, but I don't want to become trapped and ghettoized. My Jewishness is there to be tapped into when it's appropriate, as here. But my last play, Feelgood, was totally different. I'd actually like to play Othello...