~ firefly-dreaming a virtual home to learn (or teach!) alternative methods of solving problems we find facing us each day. By sharing ideas & knowledge on living with less stress, more joy & embracing tolerance & compassion we are working towards building a sustainable future for all living beings.
I WOULDN'T dare to venture an opinion as to who is the greatest actor to appear on Broadway in the past decade or so. Most accomplished diva? Definitely won't touch that. But the greatest entertainer? That one is easy: Nathan Lane.
I don't mean to slight Mr. Lane's skills as an actor. (Or, for that matter, to imply that he's no diva.) For evidence that he is a very fine actor, just check him out in the new musical "The Addams Family." Mr. Lane looks as if he's having a very good time, his impish way with a joke as appealing as ever, even with that Desi-Arnaz-with-a-head-cold accent.
snip
Mr. Lane's particular combination of gifts - a sterling skill with a wisecrack, the grace necessary for physical comedy, a mug that's malleably funny (and I mean that in a nice way), a solid set of singing chops - has always been a rare package. And yet somewhere in the vast maw of YouTube there must be evidence that at least a few American youngsters are proficiently making like George M. Cohan in front of the Mac Book...
But to what end, one sadly wonders, other than a fleeting flash of cyberglory? It's hard to imagine that tomorrow's Broadway will provide anything in the way of showcases for such paragons. Were a new Ethel Merman or Al Jolson or Jimmy Durante or Bert Lahr to emerge, few if any new vehicles could be found to suit those talents. Beginning in the 1970s the musical began to get more self-serious, offering fewer opportunities for showcasing multifaceted musical comedy performers like Tommy Tune and Angela Lansbury. (Mr. Tune, originally a performer, mostly worked behind the scenes as a choreographer and director.)
Like Mr. Lane, today's emerging stars in the old mold would probably be smothered inside a megamusical based on a movie based on a TV series based on a series of cartoons, or perhaps something less felicitous. Like a Steely Dan jukebox musical? Broadway used to build shows around talents like Mr. Lane's or Patti LuPone's or Kristin Chenoweth's; now such performers can only hope to fit into presold packages compiled from pop culture detritus.
Not theater, but the only Nathan Lane "Birdcage" YTs I could find were all from the movie. I think Isherwood was right:
Watch the turgid movie version of "The Producers," by the way, and you get a sense of why Mr. Lane never quite broke through to film fame, despite a few leading roles along the way, most notably in "The Birdcage," the grisly American remake of the grisly "La Cage aux Folles." Humor that works onstage does not always translate to film. Jokes that crackle in the theater often end up galumphing in the movies, where the life-giving connection between audience and performer is severed by a wall of celluloid.
No, Nathan Lane, like all great stage performers, is best savored live. You have to be in the room with him - even a very big room, like the Broadway palaces he now mostly plays - to feel the tickle of his genius.
