WHO knew she could sing?
Marisa Tomei, a fine actress who has been coasting on her “My Cousin Vinny” Oscar for too long, “blew out the back wall” during her audition for a Broadway revival of “Sweet Charity,” a production source says.
Producers Fran and Barry Weissler were said to be so impressed with her pipes, beauty and vulnerability that they practically offered her the role of Sweet Charity Valentine on the spot.
But it’s pretty much impossible to pin down a movie star for a Broadway run these days, and as of yesterday afternoon, sources say, the Weisslers were still trying to seal the deal.
They turned to Tomei after their first choice, “Dharma & Greg” star Jenna Elfman, dropped out of the revival a few weeks ago.
Her flacks are spinning a tale that Elfman bolted because the Weisslers never gave her a definite start date.
But the truth is that, despite singing lessons, Elfman isn’t much of a singer and was never able to master Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields’ jazzy score, which includes the standards “If They Could See Me Now,” “Big Spender” and “Where Am I Going?”
“Let’s just say her voice was too small,” said one source, adding, “and some of the notes she hit weren’t exactly the right ones.”
Said another: “She danced beautifully, she’s a terrific actress and would have looked fabulous on stage. Unfortunately, she can’t sing.”
Barry Weissler declined to comment on the casting change yesterday, but sources say he doesn’t have much time to nail down Tomei.
“Sweet Charity,” which is being directed by Walter Bobbie (“Chicago”), is scheduled to open in Toronto in April, then play a few U.S. cities before landing on Broadway next fall.
Tomei last appeared on Broadway in a terrible revival of the mystery thriller “Wait Until Dark” that contained only one real fright: Quentin Tarantino’s performance.
The Kennedy Center offered a sampling of its much-hyped Sondheim Celebration Monday night at Avery Fisher Hall.
A host of Broadway’s allegedly hot young performers reprised their roles in the festival, singing highlights from such shows as “Sunday in the Park With George,” “A Little Night Music” and “Company.”
The trouble with these Sondheim retrospectives (of which there is an endless stream) is that the young singers are up against the memory of the legendary performers who made these songs famous in the first place.
Those performances are preserved on CDs, and those who love musical theater surely have Bernadette Peters’ “Move on,” Glynis Johns’ “Send in the Clowns” and Angela Lansbury’s “The Worst Pies in London” forever ingrained in their mind’s ear.
It takes one hell of a performer to better those renditions, and, for the most part, nobody succeeded in doing so Monday night.
Indeed, the Kennedy Center lineup pretty much amounted to a Parade of the Bland, with two shining exceptions: Barbara Cook, who can’t sing a note without sending chills down the spine, and a wonderful newcomer named Marcy Harriell.
The beautiful and charismatic Harriell brought vitality, tenderness and a heartbreaking desperation to “Another Hundred People,” that great song about the loneliness of urban life from “Company.”
She was the one all the theater muckety-mucks were talking about at the post-concert reception.
Jonathan Tunick, Sondheim’s justly celebrated orchestrator who conducted some of the program Monday night, was right when he said Harriell should be cast as Ottilie, the young prostitute, in Truman Capote and Harold Arlen’s “House of Flowers” at Encores! in the spring.