[Pravernr.com |PLAYBILL OCTOBER 2013 Serene Taeatne SINCE 1884 FEATURES WIDOWS, WARS, AND WEEDS 6 Mary-Louise Parker trades one flawed woman for another in her trip back to Broadway by Harry Haun MULTIPLES OF MAYS 10 The many lives (and deaths!) of Jefferson Mays in A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder by Harry Haun THE SONGS JANIS SANG 14 Michael and Laura Joplin share the music of their sister, Janis, in a new Broadway musical by Robert Simonson THE HARLEM SHAKE-UP 38 Wynton Marsalis dreams up a new Jazz Age with help from Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes in After Midnight by Karu F. Daniels BROADWAY BOOMERS 40 Baby Boomers take a journey down memory lane with jukebox musicals by Robert Simonson DEPARTMENTS Theatre Quiz: Remembering Julie Harris 4 by Andrew Gans How Many Have You Seen? 42 Playbill Guide: Dining, Drinks & Entertainment 46 Celebrity Choice 49 by Ellis Nassour A Life in the Theatre: Chris Boneau 52 by Mervyn Rothstein ‘Aven ees 525 Sorath Avenue c Philp S. 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Pat.by Andrew Gans REMEMBERING JULIE HARRIS Julie Harris, one of the leading actresses in the American theatre in the decades after World War Il, died this past summer at the age of 87. The Academy Award-nominated actress, who later endeared herself to television audiences with her Emmy-nominated role as Lilimae Clements on the primetime soap opera Knots Landing, won a record-setting five Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Play. Pictured below are photos of each of Harris's Tony-winning performances. Can you identify each show's title? 1 Harris (pictured with William Prince) picked up her first Tony for her performance as an ill- fated nightclub singer in this 1951 John Van Druten drama, which was based on Christopher Isherwood's The Berlin Stories (also the basis for a famous musical). 2 In this 1955 Jean Anouilh adaptation of the Joan of Arc story, Harris (seated) played Joan in a cast that also boasted Christopher Plummer, Boris Karloff, and Theodore Bikel. Jay Allen's 1968 romantic comedy, adapted from the original French work by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, was set in the Greek Islands and cast Harris (pictured with Marco St. John) as an American divorcée. Abe Burrows directed Harris, who won her third Tony. 4. Harris (pictured with David Rounds) won her fourth Tony for her performance in the title role of this 1972 James Prideaux drama about the last years in the life of the widow of an American President In this 1976 one-woman William Luce play, Harris played numerous characters, including poet Emily Dickinson (as pictured). Charles Nelson Reilly directed Harris to her fifth Tony win, sjereg Auog € WET AUL Z eIaWeD e WY} | ‘SIEMSUY PLAYBILL.com |Widows, Wars, and Weeds Mary-Louise Parker sidelines Weeds for another mother of a role by Harry Haun ary-Louise Parker spent the past eight seasons on the Showtime series Weeds, playing a widowed mother of sons holding reality at bay with marijuana—by hus- tling it to suburbia to make ends meet. In Sharr White's new play, The Snow Geese, premiering Oct. 24 at the Sarnuel J. Friedman Theatre, she is again the widowed mother of sons and must get there without chemical stimulation On television she was chronically widowed, running through three husbands in eight years. In the play she is freshly widowed, with.one son bound for the front lines and another distraught that the late head of the household left them all in financial shambles. The world is too much with Elizabeth Gaesling, and, being World War | vintage with no cannabis in sight, she must somehow muster a happy face for an annual shooting party signaling the start of hunting season in upstate New York “What | love about her is what | love about all the char- acters | play—the flaws!” Parker declared with an actor’s pride. “I love how deluded she is. There's something sweet about that. Of course, | don't know her that well yet. | could change J my mind totally once | get in the rehearsal J room. But | think one thing will stay intractable—that | she's not in touch | | with reality. She has no desire to be in touch with reality at all, and there's something | | kinda admire,| oddly, about peo- ple who can do that. I'm always trying 6 to stay so organized and have a comprehensive awareness of everything that’s happening with everyone around me. And she just has no desire for that. She’s much happier to have her head in the clouds. It's more pleasant.” Again, playwright White is the tour guide for a fragile woman's fractured psyche. He last went down this road with a stubborn scientist batting Alzheimer's in The Other Place, earning its star, Laurie Metcalf, nominations for the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, and Tony awards Interestingly both of White's plays were jointly produced by Manhattan Theatre Club and Manhattan Class Company. They are the first MTC-MCC co-productions. For Parker, it's her fifth play for Manhattan Theatre Club. “That was the first place | ever played on stage in New York other than Off- Off-Off-Off Broadway, and it’s the place I’ve returned to most often. It feels like home. [MTC Artistic _ Director] Lynne Meadow and (Executive Director] Barry Grove are kind enough to always think of me, and, if they didn't, I'd probably bug them.” David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize- winning Proof won Tonys. for her, MTC, and director Daniel Sullivan, so she was quick to \) suggest Sullivan for a rematch. “Everybody wants Dan for every- thing so it wasn't a very original thought on my part, but | did express it~immediately—and \'m sure they'd already thought of him, but I’m lucky enough that he said ‘yes. I've been wanting to work with him again since Proof. “The Snow. Geese feels kinda like [a] lost Chekhov play, but not in the way that it is derivative. Sharr has his ‘own style—but it truly, truly is remi- niscent of Chekhov.” °Multiples of Mays Tony winner Jefferson Mays returns to Broadway with another heroic bout with multiple personality disorder by Harry Haun ince most actors would give their eye- S= for a good death scene, it’s easy to fathom why you'll find Jefferson Mays in seventh heaven these days—no, better make that eighth. That's how many times he goes down for the count in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder, Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak’s fiendishly funny musical, which begins previews Oct. 22 for a Nov. 17 bow at the Walter Kerr. Mays finds himself the focal point in this murderous maze playing an entire family of arrogant English aristocrats, the D'Ysquiths— pronounced DIE-skwiths—all of whom are systematically eliminated by the ninth in line, a revenge-seeking Monty Navarro played by Bryce Pinkham, no stranger to the murderous and revengeful, having played the villain in 2012's Ghost The Musical. Navarro was known as Israel Rank in his original incarnation, a book by that name, writ- ten in 1907 by Roy Horniman. It's possible that you knew him as Louis Mazzini when Dennis Price played him in the classic British romp, Kind Hearts and Coronets. In that 1949 film, Price’s prey was Alec Guinness. Yes, Mays admits, it is intimidating to follow The Great Guinness—even on a target range— “but the musical is quite a different animal. It's not Kind Hearts and Coronets tonally. And, of course, Guinness had the luxury of prosthetics and makeup to transform himself completely. My transformations are a little more slapdash.” In fact, he contends, the rea/ show occurs backstage just out of the audience's line of vision where he morphs from one character into another. “These quick changes are head- spinning,” he declares. “One, | think, is done on stage in about three seconds. "Velcro is the answer, and industrial snaps, and a team of muscular and determined dressers. It's like being in a wrestling match. The lights go out, and I'm set upon in the dark > Bre El rsa eet on ul Ace! A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder by these demon women, who tear my clothes off and put me into another outfit. Initially when | was unsure of how the show was going on— ‘sometimes, you just don’t know—I'd step back ‘on stage and never know what's going to hap- pen next. That's the truth. | cannot think past wherever | am. It's a blessing in some ways because, in that way, I'm not contemplating the various hurtles and pitfalls that lie before me. For a while, my dressers would whisper who | was before squirting some water into my mouth and shoving me back on stage. It's a fun-house ride. The first chance | get to breathe is when | get the audience to laugh.” On stage, Alexander Dodge’s pop-up greeting card-like set provides him with a delightful obstacle course. “It's set in an Edwardian theatre, sort of a stage within a stage, like those toy theatres with the paraffin lamps for footlights and bright, big, color