I went up to Cambridge, Mass., last weekend to play on Harvey Weinstein’s turf, “Finding Neverland.”
Today he plays on mine, “Hunsecker-land,” as in J.J. Hunsecker, the Broadway gossip columnist in “Sweet Smell of Success.”
Item: Jeremy Jordan
Though he’s about to get the hook, his performance as J.M. Barrie, the creator of “Peter Pan,” was excellent. It’s not an easy role to play. For the most part, Barrie is a passive observer, and passive lead characters tend to be a drag on musicals. It’s “Hello, Dolly!” not “Hello, Horace Vandergelder!”; “The Music Man,” not “Marian the Librarian.” But Jordan has a brooding intensity befitting a writer whose diffidence hides a full-throttle imagination. And when he bursts into song and dance, Jordan displays all the charm and vivacity he did as the star of “Newsies.”
This performance would surely earn a Tony nod.
Item: Matthew Morrison
If all goes according to plan — and it’s not a done deal, yet — Morrison will take over from Jordan when “Finding Neverland” opens at the Lunt-Fontanne in the spring. He was Weinstein’s first choice and played the part in a workshop earlier this year. I’m told he had an agreement to come to Broadway should he be sprung from “Glee,” which he was. (Jordan never had a Broadway clause in his contract. But Weinstein is taking care of him with some movie and television projects. It’s good to be fired by a mogul.)
Morrison hasn’t signed his contract, yet. I suppose the longer he holds out, the more money Weinstein will have to throw at him.
Item: Diane Paulus
I think she’s shrunk since the last time I saw her. Directing this production under Weinstein’s watchful eye cannot be easy, and it appears to have taken a toll. She seemed frightened. And I don’t think it was solely by my presence in the theater.
Item: Premium prices
Weinstein and I had a spirited public discussion after the show Saturday night. He called on me to stop being bitchy and become a champion of the theater —a bit like asking the sun to rise in the west and set in the east. The audience cheered him on. But I got them back by extracting a pledge from him not to charge “obscene” premium ticket prices. He agreed, but, in a rather weaselly press release this week, backtracked. He says he won’t charge “obscene” prices, obscene being in the eye of the beholder, I suspect.
Jeremy Gerard at Deadline.com got some footage of our exchange from the show’s press agent and wrote a detailed report. He sent me a link to the footage yesterday so I could check it out. But it seems the press agent has changed the password. When I (not so innocently) asked the press agent for the footage, he told me all he had was a video of Weinstein dumping a bucket of ice on my head — and making a generous $50,000 contribution to ALS.
But I think the press agent, of Rose Mary Woods Associates, is being tricky.
No matter. There were at least a hundred people in the lobby filming our exchange. If you were there, e-mail me your footage, and I think we can clear up this matter of premium prices once and for all.