If Wednesday was a dessert day where all I had to do was watch two splashy musicals, Thursday I had to do actual work. I ran around the city doing four different interviews about shows coming to the Kravis Center next season.
First it was downtown to talk to Hal Luftig, producer of the Evita revival that is on the Kravis on Broadway schedule next year, then back up to the theater district to chat with five-time Tony-winning director Jerry Zaks about how he salvaged Sister Act from a so-so London musical to a snappy Broadway entertainment.
Then it was back down into lower midtown to meet Tim Levy, a producer for Great Britain’s National Theatre, which created from scratch the great War Horse, with those amazing life-size horse puppets. That was followed by a visit with one of the show’s puppeteers, Derek Stratton, to hear what the show is like from, um, the horse’s mouth. Now all I have to do is not lose my recorded interviews between now and next season.
My reward for running around all day was seeing the incomparable Nathan Lane in Douglas Carter Beane’s new play, The Nance. The title is a derogatory term for an effeminate gay man, a stage type in the days of burlesque. Lane plays such a performer, a self-loathing, politically conservative homosexual in 1937, a time when the police were cracking down on gays who hooked up in public places like the Horn & Hardart Automat and politicians were crusading against depictions of gays onstage.
The Nance is more than a little melodramatic, but Beane cannily lightens up the evening by interspersing burlesque comedy sketches, performed by Lane and such second bananas as Lewis Stadlen and Cady Huffman (the latter reuniting with Lane from the original cast of The Producers).
It’s not a great play, but like Hit the Wall and Finks, it depicts a dark corner of our history that is worth remembering that it existed so relatively recently. This season it should be good enough to cop a Best Play Tony nomination, but the reason to see it is Lane, a comic with impeccable timing and an underrated dramatic actor.