To survive, ”Side Man” needs a star even more than it needs a Tony. And Scott Wolf should be able to attract tourists to the show over the summer.
‘PARTY of Five” heartthrob Scott Wolf will join the cast of ”Side Man” at the end of the month, theater sources confirmed yesterday.
He will replace Robert Sella as the narrator of Warren Leight’s fine play about jazz musicians during the final days of the big band era. Christian Slater played the role when the show opened on Broadway.
”Side Man” received a Tony nomination for Best Play this week and is considered the odds-on favorite to win the award. Its producers are hoping that the one-two punch of Wolf and a Tony Award will goose up the sagging box office and help the show run through the summer.
The producers did not return calls seeking comment yesterday. But sources said they had ”heated” debates about when to add Wolf to the cast. Putting him in before the Tonys, they feared, would make them look desperate – and might be seen by Tony voters as a crass attempt to generate publicity (Oh, the horror!).
In the end, though, they bowed to reality: To survive, ”Side Man” needs a star even more than it needs a Tony. And Wolf, the pretty-boy Tom Cruise lookalike who has branched out into movies as a gay soap-opera actor in ”Go,” should be able to attract tourists to the show over the summer.
Tony voters, many of whom are commercial producers, will probably give ”Side Man” points for making such a bold move.
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Broadway spent most of the week sorting out this year’s Tony nominations, with the usual amount of grumbling. Contrary to press hype, nobody much cared that Nicole Kidman wasn’t nominated for her performance in ”The Blue Room.” She was never really in the running, since ”The Blue Room,” which closed in February, is ancient history.
People were annoyed that ”Parade,” a flop that lost $4.5 million, received so many nominations. Producers feel that Tony nominations are far too valuable to be squandered on losers like ”Parade,” which was nominated for Best Musical, Score, Book and Direction.
”A complete waste,” sneered one top producer. ”As usual, the nominators don’t understand that Broadway is a business. Artistic integrity is fine, but it doesn’t sell tickets.”
But one member of the nominating committee said ”Parade’s” nine nominations did not mean there was any real enthusiasm for the show.
It’s been a lousy season for new musicals, so ”Parade” did well by default, the nominator said.
”We had to find four nominees in all the musical categories, and ‘Parade’ usually fit the bill,” the nominator said.
Peter Stone, who revised the book to ”Annie Get Your Gun,” was also grumbling this week. His book was deemed eligible for a Tony nomination because more than 50 percent of it is new. But the nominators didn’t bite. They snubbed Stone’s work, selecting instead ”Marlene,” essentially a play with music, and ”It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues,” which doesn’t even have a book.
”They were sending a clear message,” said Stone. ”They thought it was some kind of a con job. But they never bothered to find out how much of the book really is new.”