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PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Les Liaisons Dangereuses Kiss Kiss Tell Tell
By Harry Haun
02 May 2008
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Laura Linney, Ben Daniels, Mamie Gummer, Kristine Nielsen, Jessica Collins, Siβn Phillips, Benjamin Walker and Rufus Norris.
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Sex and love in the shadow of the guillotine is the subject of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, an 18th-century La Ronde which the Roundabout set twirling May 1 at the American Airlines Theatre.
The original and very influential novel by that title written by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos in 1782, seven years before the start of the French Revolution was a collection of letters by sexually overheated aristocrats. It was playwright Christopher Hampton, who, in the mid-1980s, connected the dots and fops into a pungent piece of theatre. Lording majestically over all this hyperactive hotbed-hopping is a particularly glacial pair of cynics La Marquise de Merteuil, a manipulator of Byzantine dimension, and Le Vicomte de Valmont, a ravenous rogue former lovers of longstanding and perverse understanding, who entertain each other with tales of the innocents they ruin until true and corrupting love enters the picture and befouls their cruel fun 'n' games.
Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan, Tony contenders both, introduced this wicked duo to Broadway in 1987 in a Royal Shakespeare import directed by Howard Davies. Now, in Roundabout's stylish Broadway revival by director Rufus (Festen) Norris, we have Ben Daniels and Laura Linney lounging around on French Provincial, swapping intimate secrets of the innocents they have Biblically known. A supporting cast of a dozen more is grist for their mill.
First-nighters celebrated the drama's arrival with a splashy little bash filling the third-floor ballroom (and adjacent dining rooms) of the Hilton New York Hotel.
Among them: Rosie Perez, Festen's Juliana Margulies ("I just had a baby so I'm working on that"), Sigourney Weaver and her director-husband Jim Simpson, Joan Rivers, lyricist David Zippel (a week away from putting his Wendy Wasserstein musical, Pamela's First Musical into rehearsal for his May 18 benefit premiere), Philip Bosco (Linney's senile father in "The Savages"), Leelee Sobieski, Frances De La Tour (will she be checking out how Christine Baranski handles her award-contending role in Boeing-Boeing?), set designer Tony Walton (currently building two cities for yes! A Tale of Two Cities, so he may have taken much note of this evening's dιcor), Katie Finneran (back from a month's filming of "Baby on Board" in Chicago), Cry-Baby's prize-worthy choreographer Rob Ashford, Speech and Debate's Jason Fuchs, Nine songwriter Maury Yeston, The Broadway League's Charlotte St. Martin, Tovah Feldshuh (who's doing her Golda's Balcony May 29-June 1 at Sarah Lawrence College before taking it to London's Shaw Theatre June 7-28), Jennifer Carpenter of Showtime's "Dexter," Tracy Ullman, and a covey of directors (Michael Greif, Kathleen Marshall, Mark Brokaw, Robert Longbottom and Moises Kaufman).
Television interviews were done at the theatre, but the stars soon twinkled and trickled in, and the entrances were warmly greeted with applause from the partiers.
"It's completely fulfilling," exclaimed Daniels of his belated Broadway debut (doubly overdue in light of the accolades he has accumulated back home in Britain ). "New York is my favorite city in the world, and for someone to pay for me to come and do a play here especially this extraordinary piece is thrilling. I'm quite beside myself."
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Christopher Hampton, Sigourney Weaver, Rosie Perez, Katie Finneran, Tracy Ullman, Jennifer Carpenter, Frances De La Tour, Penny Fuller and Philip Bosco.
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| photos by Aubrey Reuben |
Make no mistake about it, he's reveling in the Valmont role. "There are so many things I like about this character," he said. "He's someone who has never really been alive before when we see him at the beginning of the play. His skill is to make other people feel alive. He's a little bit like an energy vampire. And then, for the first time in his life, he falls in love, and his heart opens, and then it ultimately destroys him. So the arc of the character is extraordinary. It's beautiful to play."
His leading lady is his equal in her love for her role. "The thing that I like about the marquise is that she's in that play," Linney said on opening night. "More than the character, I love the play." Continued...
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