IT was a makeover that set Hollywood drooling. In 1998 a movie actress who was most famous for being the wife of Tom Cruise took her first step onto a Broadway stage and was instantly transformed into her own dazzling woman. O.K., maybe it wasn’t that simple. But there’s no question that Nicole Kidman’s professional life was kicked into a new, loftier orbit after she starred in “The Blue Room,” David Hare’s adaptation of “La Ronde.”
Before that, her film parts had leaned toward the decorative category of The Girl (including one in a Batman movie). After, she was getting the kind of roles that Meryl Streep regularly landed: tormented characters with foreign accents and Academy Award potential. Within a few years Ms. Kidman had been disencumbered of Mr. Cruise and picked up an Oscar for playing Virginia Woolf, if you please, in “The Hours.”
A decade later another Mrs. Tom Cruise (the third, to be exact) is making her Broadway debut. That’s Katie Holmes, whose supporting role in the revival of Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons,” that of a true-blue hometown sweetheart with a conflicted conscience, is modest compared with the five lustful characters embodied by Ms. Kidman in “The Blue Room.” But it seems fair to imagine that Ms. Holmes (another actress who appeared as The Girl in a Batman movie) is hoping that at least some of the career-rejuvenating fairy dust Broadway sprinkled on Ms. Kidman will fall upon her too. (“All My Sons,” also starring John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Patrick Wilson, scheduled to open on Oct. 16 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.)
Broadway, it seems, has eclipsed Playboy as the place to make Hollywood pay attention. There was a time when female movie stars who felt they were being ignored by the industry took off their clothes for Hugh Hefner’s magazine. Now they brush up their Shakespeare — or Schnitzler or Miller — and hit Gotham. Of course if you can manage to be naked while appearing in a production with cultural cachet, as Ms. Kidman did, then you’re really in business.
Ms. Holmes, as far as I know, is remaining fully dressed in “All My Sons.” It’s Daniel Radcliffe, the young actor who achieved international celebrity as the title character in the Harry Potter movie franchise, who bids fair to pull a Nicole this season. Mr. Radcliffe will be doing the full monty in the revival of Peter Shaffer’s “Equus” (also starring Richard Griffiths and set to open on Sept. 25 at the Broadhurst Theater), a psychological melodrama with a certain literary heft.
The timing is most auspicious for Mr. Radcliffe, whose performance in “Equus” in London garnered admiring reviews. The Potter series, after all, is nearing its end. And while Mr. Radcliffe has yet to leave adolescence, he is probably as tired of being The Boy (especially That Boy) as Ms. Holmes is of being The Girl. They grow up so quickly these days.
I missed seeing Mr. Radcliffe in London, so I can’t personally vouch for his stage chops, nor for those of Ms. Holmes. But I can predict with confidence that another familiar movie face, Kristin Scott Thomas, will seem right at home in Ian Rickson’s production of Chekhov’s “Seagull,” which I caught (and loved) in London in 2006.
Ms. Scott Thomas, who is known to movie audiences for looking enigmatic and patrician in films like “The English Patient,” may be making her Broadway debut this season. But she has already proved her classic stage mettle in London with arresting turns in Chekhov (“The Three Sisters” as well as “The Seagull”) and Pirandello (“As You Desire Me”).
She is joined in “The Seagull” (to open on Oct. 1 at the Walter Kerr) by Peter Sarsgaard, who in recent years has been cutting a cinematic swath with movies that include “Boys Don’t Cry” and “Kinsey.” The first time I saw him, though, was way off Broadway 12 years ago, when he was giving a blissfully funny performance as a male variation on Blanche du Bois in the Drama Department’s brilliant deconstruction of Tennessee Williams’s “Kingdom of Earth.”
I am not nervous about the first Broadway outings of Ms. Scott Thomas, Mr. Sarsgaard or, for that matter, Jeremy Piven, who will be appearing as a foulmouthed studio executive in a revival of David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow” (to open on Oct. 23 at the Ethel Barrymore). Mr. Piven has of course had several years of practice impersonating a dirty-talking Hollywood power player as the slimy über-agent in the HBO series “Entourage.” But he also showed sturdy stage legs when he appeared Off Broadway in 2004 in Neil LaBute’s “Fat Pig.”
No, the Hollywood celebrity I’m really worried about is that big green lug named Shrek, the popular animated movie hero who will be trying to effect the transition from two to three dimensions (and from speech to song) when he appears in the eponymously titled musical scheduled to open on Dec. 14 at the Broadway Theater. Mr. Shrek (who will be channeled by the fine flesh-and-blood actor Brian d’Arcy James) is famous for his crudeness, haplessness and general gracelessness. So let me offer a friendly bit of advice to this likable ogre: If you feel you’re losing ’em, pal, just shuck the clothes. via
