By Jonathan Abarbanel
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| Comedian Richard Kind joked about his Jeff Awards. |
Accepting his award as outstanding actor in a musical, at the 35th annual Joseph Jefferson Awards, Nov. 3, Richard Kind (“Spin City”) made light of the fact that he never won a Jeff Award during the years he was a star at Chicago’s Second City, the famous improvisational theater troupe.
“I’ve given this acceptance speech about 3,000 times, but I’ve always had a sink, some shaving cream and a razor in front of me,” Kind cracked.
The Jeffs are Chicago’s equivalent of the Tony Awards. Kind won his Jeff for his return to Chicago last summer as star of “Bounce,” the new musical by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, directed by Broadway legend Harold Prince. The show had its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre. “Who’d ever think that I’d be at a podium thanking Stephen Sondheim, Hal Prince and John Weidman?” Kind asked rhetorically. “Besides their talents, they are insecure, caring people,” he concluded.
While Kind received rave reviews all around, “Bounce” did not. The critics nearly were unanimous in saying the show needed a lot of work before heading to Broadway. The show now is playing at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Reports from the field say that only cosmetic changes have been made, rather than the major retooling most observers felt was needed. The buzz is that if the producers take “Bounce” into New York, it’s likely to be DOA.
EXCLUSIVE EDWARD ALBEE INTERVIEW. The Goodman Theatre is devoting much of its season to the plays of Edward Albee, in honor of Albee’s 75th birthday last March. Although Albee plays have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama three times (with several additional nominations), very few of them have been made into movies. The most notable film of an Albee work is the first: “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and directed by Mike Nichols.
In an exclusive interview with this writer, Albee said that Hollywood “used to pursue me more, but then they realized that I was a really a difficult guy. Only three of my plays have been made into films. One of them, ‘The Ballad of the Sad Caf?,’ was made into a film so dreadful that nobody ever saw it, fortunately. But both ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?’ and ‘A Delicate Balance’ were shot, basically, without distortion.
“The plays were filmed pretty much intact, and so I got spoiled. So, now, when anybody comes and says ‘We want to make a movie of a play of yours,’ I say, ‘OK, that’s fine. The way I work is really quite simple. I choose the cast, I choose the director, and I’ll write the screenplay.’ So, you know, they don’t call back very often. I suppose I should take the money and run, but I don’t like that.”
“THE LAST SAMURAI” IS LOGAN’S LATEST. Compared to Albee, writer John Logan has had no problem going Hollywood. As a young playwright in Chicago, Northwestern University grad Logan loved to write about history. He wrote about Lenin and Czar Nicholas II (“Snow”), about the Leopold-Loeb murder trial (“Never the Sinner”), about the Lindbergh kidnapping (“Hauptmann”). Logan told this reporter that he thought his fascination with history had something to do with the fact that his grandfather had been chief hull inspector for the Titanic, back in the Belfast shipyards in 1912.
Whatever, Logan has taken his love of history to Hollywood and t the bank! His costume screenplays include “Gladiator,” “The Time Machine” and an HBO film about the making of “Citizen Kane.” Logan’s newest also has an historic setting: “The Last Samurai” starring Tom Cruise, now in release. It’s set in 1870s Japan. These days, everything Logan writes seems to get greenlighted: he was onscreen over the summer as author of the animated feature, “Sinbad.”
JONATHAN ABARBANEL covers theatre for WBEZ Chicago Public Radio. He’s theater editor of the weekly Windy City Times, and featured columnist for Backstage, the national theatre trade paper.
