By Harry Haun
30 Sep 2009
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| Rain stars Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman; guests Jerry Seinfeld, Stephanie March and Matthew Morrison |
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben |
While the threat of real rain hovered above, a relentless drizzle of dazzle welcomed A Steady Rain to Broadway Sept. 29. The glitzy procession that poured into the Schoenfeld looked like Stars Night Out and got the show off to an hour's delay.
The catnip that had brought the celebs out in droves was the stage pairing of two contemporary screen superheroes "Wolverine, meet Bond. James Bond" in the muck and mire of a more mortal plane than they normally function in on film.
Hugh Jackman of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia and Daniel Craig of Chester, England cross paths convincingly, given the dialect coaching of Jess Platt as Chicago cops riding out a tsunami of bad-judgment calls.
Basically, Keith Huff's play (his first for Broadway) is a two-hander a coupla white cops sitting around talking, to themselves and to the audience but it seems more. The incidents relayed in the conversations are vivid and gripping enough to stick to the roof of the mind. The secret is simple, said Huff: "You need two actors who are really good storytellers. Hugh and Daniel both are natural, endearing, engaging storytellers and they give life to all the other characters."
The 39-year-old author is much-produced in the Chicago area. "I've written about 40 to 50 one-act plays and full-length plays in the 25 years that I've been doing this."
The person that Huff credits to making this come to pass has a conspicuously terse three-word biography in the Playbill: "FREDERICK ZOLLO (Producer)." Of course, that name comes first among the ten producers presenting A Steady Rain.
"Fred Zollo was one of the producers of the show when we ran it in Chicago, and he knows Daniel," Huff explained. (Writer's Note: More than "knows," Zollo and his wife, Barbara Broccoli, produce the 007 series in which Craig now associates.)
"Daniel came to him and said, 'I'm looking for a play to do. Do you have anything?' Fred had the play in his pocket so he just whipped it out and handed it to him."
It actually seems to have been that simple. Craig took an immediate shine to the play and, in particular, to the part of Joey, the shy, reformed drunk who harbors a passion for his partner Denny's wife and family life. "He always wanted to do that role, from the very beginning. He found the layers of it appealing, and I knew he would be good in the play. What he did with it is just a revelation a playwright's dream."
It was Craig's idea to give himself a sad, droopy, mojo-sapping mustache to help you further forget he'd ever been in Her Majesty's Secret Service. "Once he got rid of the handlebars, it was a good idea," Huff conceded. "At first, it was a little 'YMCA.'"
Arguably, the most tragic misstep that Huff's two officers make doing their chaotic rounds returning a hysterical Vietnam teenager to the outstretched arms of his "uncle" carries a real-life resonance. "It should," the playwright admitted. "It was actually three Milwaukee policemen who turned a Laotian boy over to Jeffrey Dahmer in 1988, and I always thought that was a dramatically potent situation because the two cops were still fighting to get their jobs back while the police were still building a case against Jeffrey Dahmer. I thought 'There is so much here to explore,' so I took the incident, fictionalized it, recast it in Chicago with two Chicago cops and worked it in, and I'm really pleased that it has that sort of resonance."
At the final critics preview, the power of that scene was interrupted by a cellphone, pretty much leveling for actor and audience alike the anguish that Jackman had built, reliving the awful moment when the youth was clinging to him for dear life.
"Can you get that?" he said, breaking character (using the same line Craig had when he was similarly interrupted at an earlier preview). Keeping a lid on it, Jackman paced the stage till the ringing stopped, giving new meaning to "Amazing Grace."
At a press conference later, Craig opted to blow off the whole cellphone brouhaha (which made the YouTube rounds): "I don't know anything about that. I don't know what you're talking about. Hugh doesn't know what you're talking about." Etc.
But Jackman's wife, Deborra-Lee Furness, knew only too well. "It came at the worst possible moment," she noted, "but you know what? Someone I know who was in the audience said, 'All of a sudden, the audience was much more involved like, they were really present to him. There was a great immediacy between the audience and the performers. They're both so fine like a great tennis match. You got two fine actors up there, and it's so smooth the way that they play ball."
Director John Crowley, a Tony contender four years ago for Martin McDonagh's super-creepy crime thriller, The Pillowman, was almost the logical choice to helm A Steady Rain. Even Crowley conceded that there are certain, tell-tale echoes. "I guess there are," he said, "because I get drawn to such similar stuff, which is sorta dark material, but I wasn't drawn to this because it reminded me of Pillowman. No, quite the opposite, actually. The form of it is very different to anything I've ever done that much direct address to the audience.
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The fact that A Steady Rain gives the two film stars a good shot at playing flesh-and-blood, fallible types, for a refreshing change, may have been a point of attraction for them, Crowley allowed "except that both of them come to the stage free of that superhero stuff. I think what's exceptional about them in the films that they do with Bond and with Wolverine is that they both make those characters very real and also very human as well. That's why they're good at what they do."
Next on the director's agenda is the new McDonagh play, and the first of his to premiere on Broadway: A Behanding in Spokane. "We're going to open it here in the new year," he promised. "It's about a man who has lost his hand. He's looking for his hand, basically." And how does one cast that? "With a man who's got a hand, preferably, I think. We're in the middle of casting that show right now." Continued...
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