Wednesday, April 30

Great news about the Penguins, going up 3-0 on the Rangers. These victories can be even more satisfying when you happen to be right in the heart of enemy territory.

This is the day the ShowPlaners from Pittsburgh arrived, shepherded by Paul and Jackie Busang of Gulliver's Travels. They've been making the arrangements for PG ShowPlanes and Critics Choice Tours since 1990 (and they handled my tours for the Pitt Informal Program for a decade before that), so I can't imagine even wanting to do this without their help.

My morning was filled with more hours on the laptop, writing about Lenora (here's the interview) and "Gypsy" (here's the review).

Mark Rylance in one of his trade-mark hats, signing programs and posters at the stage door of "Boeing-Boeing."

In the nick of time I went racing off to meet my friend Jane Hewes at the matinee of the Patrick Stewart-Kate Fleetwood "Macbeth." What a gripping play it is, as staged by designer Anthony Ward and director Rupert Goold -- as contemporary in presentation and meaning as a totalitarian putsch in Bosnia or Iraq.

More about that when I review it, which I might do in tandem with tonight's very different show, the 1960s farce "Boeing-Boeing." This duo goes in the "from the sublime to the (almost) ridiculous" category, i.e. from tragedy to farce.

I met the PG ShowPlane group at our welcoming dinner in the Charlotte Restaurant at our hotel, the Millennium Broadway on 44th, just east of Times Square. In recent years we've mainly stayed at the big Marriott Marquis right on Times Square, but their prices have gone through the roof. The Millennium is just as handy and very comfortable, and I like the fact that it's smaller and the elevators are quicker.

Broadway's handsome old Lyceum Theatre, home now of 'Macbeth.'

Of course, I don't pick the hotel for the PG trips -- Paul and Jackie do that -- but I do pick the plays, and in prospect, I like the variety of what we have on tap. It's heavily musical, of course, because that's what Broadway does best and why most people sign up. We have one play (farce), one classic musical and two new ones. We'll see how it goes.

It certainly started well: "Boeing-Boeing" is just as funny here as it was in London last spring. Director Matthew Warchus and star Mark Rylance are the only two carry-overs from London, with the rest of it cast here, led by Christine Baranski and Bradley Whitford ("West Wing") in place of Frances de la Tour and Roger Allam. Much more in the review.

I ended the day with a 90-minute phone interview with Anthony Chisholm, back in Pittsburgh. In my business, you've got to keep up with Broadway, but Pittsburgh theater never stops. Chisholm, who originated key roles in four August Wilson plays and brought them to New York, is in Pittsburgh working on "Two Trains Running" for the small Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre -- so we were talking until about 2 a.m.

Thursday, May 1

Happy May Day! With this unseasonable cold, it certainly doesn't feel much like May, but the calendar doesn't lie.

Posters of famous (or not) Broadway flops line the walls of Jo Allen's.

I did, however -- lie (abed) this morning, I mean, after that late interview. Then I wrote, then off to meet Mark Rylance for a luncheon interview at Joe Allen's, the theater hangout. That's the man who's played Hamlet at the Pittsburgh Public Theater and also Olivia ("Twelfth Night") and the Duke ("Measure for Measure") in Pittsburgh, the last two with the company from Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London, which he led.

Mark is the easiest interview in the world, disarmingly frank, with no airs. He's one of those abnormal actors who are more interested in the person they're talking to than in themselves, so you don't have an interview with Mark so much as a wide-ranging conversation that goes places you haven't anticipated. In the interests of whatever it is you hope to write, sometimes you have to wrench it back in that direction, even though you hate to because the direction it's taken has been so interesting.

We talked mainly about the play he wrote and produced last year, "I Am Shakespeare," which sounds like a hoot, and the Pittsburgh play he's writing now, about Carnegie and Frick. More about these when I publish the interview. (Here's the link to that interview.)

More of the flops memorialized at Jo Allen's.

I assumed he was able to work on Broadway because he's an American citizen (he grew up in Wisconsin), but it turns out he gave up his American citizenship out of disagreement with recent policies abroad. So he's here courtesy of American Equity, presumably under the star exception -- and of course he is a star, albeit an unassuming one making his first appearance on Broadway.

About "Boeing Boeing," I asked him about the increased physicality since London (his character gets knocked about a lot), and he laughed. "American actors grow up on beef and milk," he said, meaning they're robust, and yes, he does have a few bruises to show for it.

In the evening, while the group was seeing "Young Frankenstein," I went to "In the Heights," which has been described as a Latino "Rent." Actually, it's less cutting edge than that -- the rap-inflected lyrics are understandable and there's a predictable (appealing) sentiment about the story of young love in the barrio under the George Washington Bridge. On first blush, I'd call this a strong contender for the Tony.