I haven’t been to the theater for about a month and am starting to experience withdrawal. In an effort to stave off physical symptoms, I searched the arts section of The New York Timesfor interesting theater articles. I came across this one by theater critic Charles Isherwood. Without rehashing the entire article, it’s basically Isherwood observing that while actors used to go from Broadway to Hollywood, it’s now more common to go from Hollywood to Broadway. He highlights Claire Danes as an example of the new trend and
Amy Ryan as an anomalous exception.
Three guesses which model I prefer.
I had actually been thinking about these two actresses prior to reading the article, so I found it particularly interesting. I’ve been following the coverage of Claire Danes in Pygmalion – because I like her and I because I feared it was poor casting. And less than an hour before I read the article, an actor friend had been raving about Amy Ryan’s performance in Gone Baby Gone.
Isherwood notes that reviews of Pygmalion have been all over the map. (Check out the good, the mixed and the bad.) Now, I like Claire Danes, who has been getting a lot of mediocre-to-lousy press this year due to Evening. (Unlike most people, I didn’t hate
Evening. Of course, I also liked Ishtar. And I didn’t like Good Will Hunting.) But I wouldn’t have cast her and was concerned that this role might prove a catastrophe. Could she have picked a more difficult role? Or one more dependent on consistent, spot-on accents? Or one more associated (in musical form) with luminaries Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews? She has not been universally panned, so the casting was not an obvious failure, and she appears to have handled the accents well. But a better Broadway (or West End, for that matter) talent could likely have delivered more to audiences. (Of course, there’s always the question of whether audiences would have paid to see a classically trained but lesser-known Eliza.)
Claire Danes is not the only movie/TV actress on Broadway these days. Jennifer Garner is getting mediocre reviews as Roxanne to Kevin Kline’s Cyrano in the Broadway revival of Cyrano de Bergerac. (He
is getting fantastic reviews. But then, he is an amazing Broadway actor – I can attest to this, having seen him in On the Twentieth Century and The Pirates of Penzance.) So, neither Danes nor Garner is doing much to change my views on stunt-casting. However, I do freely concede that there are actors primarily known for movie work who are fantastic on Broadway.
Kathleen Turner, for example, was quite good (not to mention naked onstage about 10 feet from me!) as Mrs. Robinson in the 2002 production of The Graduate. And she was phenomenal in the 2005 revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Phenomenal, I tell you. She did not win the Tony Award, and that was only OK because Cherry Jones won it for Doubt. But still, stage training makes for better actors. Even Megan Cavanaugh noted this in response to a reader question in Michelle Paradise’s “Exes & Ohs” Video Blog: Episode 4. And it seems that Amy Ryan’s performance in Gone Baby Gone illustrates the value of this kind of training and experience.
I have not seen Amy Ryan on stage – yet – but I understand from theater friends that she is extraordinary. According to Isherwood, she was the highlight of the 2005 revival of A Streetcar Named Desire. Here she is in that production, with Natasha Richardson’s hand upon her thigh. Given the chasm separating how I would like theater to be cast and how it is actually cast, it would be helpful for me to lose (or at least soften) my biases. Any more examples of good screen-to-stage transitions?
