ROSIE O’Donnell, the host and producer of this year’s Tony Awards, phoned last week to say that she will bring the Tony telecast in on time – and that all the musical numbers will get on the air.
As The Post reported last week, word in the theater industry was that O’Donnell had concocted a long-running opening number that threatened to gobble up air time allotted to scenes from the seven Tony-nominated musicals.
Theater people feared a repeat of last year’s “It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues” fiasco, when a scene from that show was cut at the last minute to save time.
But O’Donnell, who finished writing her opening number last Thursday, said, “It is going to be shorter than the number we did the last time we produced and hosted the Tonys.”
As for theater people who are worried that the Tony show will run past its two-hour slot on CBS, O’Donnell pointedly noted: “The last two times I hosted and produced the show, it did not run long. We went right on time. Last year, I had no involvement in the program, which is why ‘It Ain’t Nothin’ But the Blues’ didn’t get on the air.”
If you want to clock Rosie’s opening number, tune into the Tonys June 4.
The festivities begin at 8 p.m. with a Tony preview on PBS. The awards show itself begins at 9 p.m. on CBS.
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What a mess they make at “True West.”
As two feuding brothers in the hit revival of Sam Shepard’s famous play, John C. Reilly and Philip Seymour Hoffman have a jolly time trashing the set, which represents their mother’s kitchen in a middle-class Southern California home.
They smash a typewriter to smithereens with a golf club. They rip down a row of hanging potted plants. They pull a phone out of a wall. They throw 26 slices of buttered toast up to the ceiling. They spray beer and champagne all over the place, leaving the floor littered with empty cans and bottles. And they empty the contents of four drawers, scattering kitchen utensils in every direction.
The destruction of the kitchen is, of course, in the stage directions of the play. But Reilly and Hoffman go at it with a vengeance.
“They both go full out in the messy department,” jokes Billy Barnes, the show’s production stage manager and associate director. “They don’t hold back.”
The one thing the actors don’t do, however, is clean up after themselves.
That unenviable task falls to four stagehands, who, armed with a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a mop and several bottles of Fantastik, spend 45 minutes cleaning the set.
“It’s Mom’s kitchen, so it has to be pristine,” says Barnes. “There can be no hint of the mess that is to come.”
Each stagehand is assigned a specific clean-up task – wiping the toast and margarine off the ceiling of the kitchen, for instance, or replacing all the untensils in the kitchen drawer.
The production goes through one jumbo-size loaf of Wonder bread and one tub of margarine per performance. The beer is non-alcoholic O’Doul’s. Each can is slipped inside a Schlitz sleeve.
The carpet is dry-cleaned once a week so that the theater does not reek of stale beer.
While the mess is usually confined to the stage, people sitting in the first rows of the orchestra sometimes get sprayed with beer.
“It’s the experience of live theater,” deadpans Barnes.