Benedict Cumberbatch next plays a painter of cats. Not those Broadway musical cats. Real ones. Mr. Cumberbatch’s whole name plus the movie’s whole title, “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” needs a whole marquis longer than a cat’s tail.
Who’s Louis Wain?
A Brit. Lived late 1800s to 1930s. King George was a fan. H.G. Wells was a fan. An artist who drew cats, he was called “schizophrenic . . . showing psychotic deterioration” and “the Mona Lisa of asylum art.”
Cumberbatch who will immortalize him: “His influence dripped through our culture all these years. My sister had his artwork on her walls. His anthropomorphic drawings, paintings and illustrations of cats, humorous and politicized, were whimsical and profound.” OK.
Claire Foy plays the wife. Catnip or spilled milk, the thing opens next month.
Bits & bobs
Besides local hype of restaurants reopening, the national hustle is travel. Telling you schlep here, go there is Discoverer.com hustling a black sand beach in Hawaii, eccentric millionaire’s home in California, some cockamaimie Nevada geyser, and a whocareswhere wee-wee pad named Dog Bark Park Inn . . . Not headed for such exotica was George Stephanopoulos. Forget time to scrub. Speed-walking Lex and 60th in shorts and a tee in such a rush he still had chalk on his hands. IPhone in his ear . . . On to US Open semifinalist Leylah Fernandez who not only topped Elina Svitolina but celebrated birthday 19 with coach, mother, sister, a party of 10, over medium rare at Tudor City Steakhouse.
On call cash
So this inexplicable message, unsigned — word for word — appears on my cellphone from an unfamiliar 714 area code: “Michalowsky WBH is interested in buying your home at 467 Park Springs CT and prepared to make you a cash offer.”
So, listen, whatever you are, I don’t live in Connecticut. I don’t know where’s Park Springs. I don’t look to sell my home. I don’t know whothehell’s Michalowsky. I don’t know how you got this phone number. I don’t want to hear from you again. But: What kind of cash we talking about?
A Charles in charge
Southerner Roe Hartrampf will play Prince Charles in Broadway’s “Diana the Musical.” It opens Nov. 17. Roe: “I’ve got the frame. Long curly hair. Look good in a suit. And watched enough Hugh Grant movies to do a super posh mumbly fumbly British accent.
“To audition, I made a singing/dancing tape in my LA bedroom and sent it. Didn’t work. So then I sang the songs a cappella into my phone. They liked something and had me come to New York. Cost a lot to fly to New York. I wasn’t working much then but I really wanted this. I auditioned in full suit with dress shoes like Prince Charles. Six weeks later they called.
“That’s four years ago. I’ve studied him on YouTube videos, and for a year carried around his biography just living him.”
OK, to important things. The scene where he tells Camilla the mistress now wife now maybe future consort that he wants to be her Tampax?
“Not in the show. Was but they took it out. Didn’t go over well.”
Pre-pandemic the show was in previews. What’s he done meanwhile?
“Went back to bartending. How the royals will feel about this show, who knows, but there’s no villains. We’re fans of everyone involved. It will be an enormous hit, but . . . if not . . . there’s always brunch. And bartending again. I make a mean martini.”
Cabbie: “Even with traffic, bicycles, roadside restaurants, congestion and construction you must be careful to avoid hitting a pedestrian. Because if you hit one you have to fill out a report.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.