Here’s a fruit fight for you: Liberace versus Liberace!
My report the other week about Hollywood producer Jerry Weintraub’s upcoming stage version of the hit HBO movie “Behind the Candelabra” has triggered a mad dash to the rhinestone-encrusted piano.
Playwright Douglas Carter Beane, who did crackerjack work on the underrated “Sister Act,” is, I’m told, a Liberace fanatic and is willing to shelve all projects to go to work on this one.
He’s met with the Nederlanders, who may be co-producing the musical with Weintraub. I hear he showed up at their offices with his hair coiffed, a silver-fox fur coat draped round his shoulders and a ring on every finger.
That’s how badly he wants the job.
All kidding aside, Beane would be a good choice. I loved the creepy “Behind the Candelabra,” but a musical, especially one about Liberace, needs some campy humor, and Beane’s the man to supply it.
For a director, may I suggest Jerry Zaks? He worked on “Sister Act” with Beane, and they get along extremely well. Zaks knows how to stage a splashy musical number — but he can do the intimate, unsettling scenes between Liberace and his boy toy, too.
Meanwhile, the producers of another Liberace musical are hoping to get their show up before Weintraub can get his out of the starting gate.
Producer and lyricist Barbara Carole Sickmen is hard at work on her version, “Liberace: I’ll Be Seeing You . . .” — this one authorized by Liberace’s estate. She’s writing it with composer Johnny Rodgers and 87-year-old book writer Roger O. Hirson (“Pippin”).
Sickmen says she portrays Liberace in a “truthful and tasteful manner” but the show takes a dark turn in the second act when Liberace, during a libel trial, is forced to deny his homosexuality.
“We examine the true struggle he was forced to endure,” she wrote in an e-mail, “the struggle to keep his homosexuality hidden and his willingness to perjure himself again and again to protect his celebrity and his career from being destroyed!”
I don’t know if Broadway’s big enough for two Liberace musicals, so may the best fruity ivory tickler win!
Nathan Lane returned to “The Nance” last night after being forced to leave the show Wednesday evening after injuring his foot on the turntable. (His understudy, Stephen DeRosa, stepped in for him.) I’m reminded of the time — in 1991, I think — Nathan, playing Death, fell out of the tree in “On Borrowed Time.”
The week before, the papers were full of stories about certified nut case Nicol Williamson whacking Evan Handler on his backside with a sword in “I Hate Hamlet.”
Asked what happened in the tree, Nathan quipped: “Nicol Williamson pushed me.”
My colleague Elisabeth Vincentelli and I can’t stop watching a YouTube video of the gorgeous Renée Elise Goldsberry singing “Old Friend” from the Encores! production of “I’m Getting My Act Together and Taking It on the Road” (review below).
I had no plans to see this show. It struck me as a relic from the ’70s, strictly for aging, sandal-wearing feminists.
But since I’ve been wearing sandals quite a bit lately — and can’t get this great song out of my head — I’ll be there tomorrow cheering Goldsberry on.
Let’s take back the night, girls!