Category: Theater

Jeff Daniels has accomplished a lot battling boredom.

Before he moved to New York in 1976, he bought a guitar to play when he wasn’t getting work. After he moved back to Michigan in the 1980s, he started getting bored between movie jobs, so he formed the Purple Rose Theater Company. That’s why today, in addition to being an actor known for portraying Atticus Finch on Broadway and Harry Dunne in “Dumb and Dumber,” Daniels, 68, is an accomplished musician and playwright who sometimes performs a one-man musical at a theater he helped bring to life.

“Alive and Well Enough,” his 12-episode audio memoir that Audible plans to release Sept. 7, incorporates skits, bits, songs and stories from his career. It leans heavily on his passion for the work, regardless of whether it resonates on the level of his role in the 1983 film “Terms of Endearment.”

“The rush is between action and cut, when you’re doing it,” Daniels said in a phone interview this month. “The curtain call has always been kind of a silent movie for me. I walk out and I see them, I hear them, but that’s not the climax. That’s not what happened. For me, by that point, it’s over.”

Daniels talked about pursuing his other endeavors — creative and athletic — while avoiding ticks. These are edited excerpts from the conversation and an email.

1

‘The Beatles: Get Back’

I loved every minute of Peter Jackson’s documentary. Seeing the band’s creative process, to watch people of that caliber face the same mountain that everybody else does — whether they’re writing a song or a play or a musical or a poem — was affirming.

2

Golf in the Backyard

During Covid, when we all had to kind of bunker, our family put together a golf course on our property. We play with plastic balls, and we each use one club. We’ve got a creek and a pond and some things you have to work around. But you never have a problem getting a tee time, and there’s never a slow foursome in front of you.

3

My Kindle

I love the portable library aspect of it, and I read more because of it. I recently read “Grinning at the Edge,” Paul Allen’s biography of the playwright Alan Ayckbourn. And I’ve got Rick Rubin’s “The Creative Act” queued up now.

4

Detroit Tigers

They’re young and they’re talented and they’re getting better every season. For me, it’s fascinating to watch the management manage the talent and the contracts and who you need. It’s the same uniforms, the same game, the same field, and yet the players change. The cast changes. It’s this living, breathing thing that’s evolving.

5

Clearing Your Head in the Woods

Things get unlocked when you’re walking or biking through the woods. If you’re stuck on something, then just go for a bike ride and wait. Across the street from my house, there’s a state recreation area. It’s kind of like having 10,000 acres of your own, which you didn’t have to pay for. It’s terrific, especially in the winter when there aren’t any ticks.

6

Circle Rep

When I went to Circle Rep Off Broadway in the 1970s, they had a whole bunch of playwrights there, including Lanford Wilson and John Bishop. That’s where I fell in love with that kind of theater — live, creating, new play stuff. I wanted to create that creative place at Purple Rose Theater Company, where I’m surrounded by like-minded people who have to do this thing because it’s what we do.

7

‘Impractical Jokers’

When I was doing “To Kill a Mockingbird” on Broadway, I would come back to my apartment and turn on the hidden-camera show “Impractical Jokers” to wind down after a show. Whatever Atticus Finch might’ve watched if he were around, it probably wouldn’t have been “Impractical Jokers.” It was a way to disconnect from the show and just unplug. And the guys just crack me up.

8

New York City

I go to New York for the theater — to see it and be in it — but also to remind myself of who I am. It’s all about the imagination and the art and the creativity, and imagining all those writers who were in New York and kicking around. It’s a good place for me to write.

9

My Guitar

For my entire career, an acoustic guitar has kept me creatively alive. Over the past 20 years, I’ve played in clubs all over the country, but my regular gig is on my porch looking out at the lake.

10

Writing, Even When It’s Hard

There’s a battle to it. But when it happens, when you unlock it and that thing launches you toward your ending in a way that you never saw coming, that’s the fireworks. Writing that line that’s going to end the scene, and you close your laptop because you’re going to take the rest of the day off, that’s what keeps you going. You hang onto those euphoric moments.

Edith Wharton’s 1934 autobiography, “A Backward Glance,” glances a bit more carefully at some things than others. She gives her close friend and fellow literary lion Henry James a chapter, but names her husband of 28 years exactly once. (And that’s only because she quotes James referring to him.)

One subject Wharton doesn’t mention at all? “The Shadow of a Doubt,” a full-length 1901 play that got close to a Broadway opening before foundering under murky circumstances. It was all but forgotten — which is perhaps what Wharton had intended — until two scholars unearthed a script in 2016.

Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University in New Jersey, and Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, found the script in the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. (Crucially, the play was filed not under the center’s well-combed-over Wharton holdings but rather in its collection of “Playscripts and Promptbooks.”)

“We often don’t have the complete picture, especially with women writers from that period,” Chinery said. “Their work is so spread out that there’s a lot we still don’t know about.”

Audiences will finally be able to see for themselves at the Shaw Festival, in the bucolic Canadian hamlet Niagara-on-the-Lake, which presents works written by and in the spirit of George Bernard Shaw each summer. Nestled alongside works by Shaw, J.M. Synge and Noël Coward this year is the world premiere of “The Shadow of a Doubt,” which opened Aug. 20 at the Royal George Theater.

Tim Carroll, the festival’s artistic director, said he was constantly on the lookout for new works to add to the festival’s repertory. “I have friends all over the world sending me links to articles about new discoveries,” he said. “And 95 times out of 100, you realize this is a forgotten play for a reason.”

But he said “Shadow,” a somewhat lurid mash-up of Oscar Wilde’s drollery and Henrik Ibsen’s noose-tightening melodrama, “ticked three boxes”: It was by a well-known author, it was written during Shaw’s lifetime and it had never received a full staging. (There was a BBC Radio adaptation in 2018, and the Red Bull Theater staged a reading the following year.)

Carroll felt Wharton’s play was in that 5 percent of discoveries worth unearthing. “It’s not perfect, but it’s jolly interesting,” he said.

As it happens, Wharton’s interest in the theater went well beyond the occasional stage adaptations of her novels. Before she found success with “The House of Mirth” in 1905, Chinery said, Wharton had forged relationships with several New York theater professionals and worked on adaptations and brief works that she called “dialogues.”

“Shadow,” the story of a nurse who marries uneasily into a wealthy family after her patient’s death, was poised to become Wharton’s big step forward. The play entered rehearsals in February 1901 with the impresario Charles Frohman and the noted leading lady Elsie de Wolfe on the bill. It was scheduled to be performed as a one-off matinee at the Empire Theater, then a Broadway venue, which was a common prelude to a longer run, but it never got that far.

Why? Accounts vary, with culprits ranging from the subject matter (assisted suicide) to a discontented Frohman to an unenthusiastic de Wolfe. Wharton reportedly planned to “strengthen some of the roles” during the announced postponement. But for whatever reason, the postponement became permanent and essentially marked the end of her playwriting days.

Much of the play’s raw material would soon provide fodder for her 1907 novel “The Fruit of the Tree,” which served as a useful resource for the cast and crew of the Shaw Festival’s new production. This was especially valuable since the script raised some questions of its own. Katherine Gauthier, who stars as the upwardly mobile (and potentially sinister) Kate Derwent, said she identified several aspects that she believes would have been tweaked after the initial Empire Theater performance.

“It had kind of a smorgasbord of genres,” Gauthier said of the original text. “Our challenge has been to put all of these people in the same world.”

Gauthier is a playwright herself, as is the director, Peter Hinton-Davis, who described the initial script as “a bit like getting a rehearsal draft” — to the point where he felt almost queasy about taking it on.

“We really don’t know why it didn’t get produced, and part of me wonders if Wharton even wanted it produced,” Hinton-Davis said. “We all have stuff at the bottoms of drawers.”

He said the “Shadow” actors, eager to make a good first impression on behalf of the piece, felt more beholden to the original text than they would have for a better-known work. All of the words being performed are Wharton’s, but Hinton-Davis described the rehearsal process as “a constant navigation between the found text and the edited text that we used.” For one thing, he arrived at rehearsals with a considerably leaner version, only to reinsert certain witticisms and plot points along the way.

Hinton-Davis also added some audiovisual components, including real-time close-ups courtesy of four onstage cameras, that might have sent de Wolfe to her fainting couch. “Some people will be divided on this production, no question,” said Carroll, who contrasted this approach to what he called the “archaeologically exact sort of staging” common to so many period pieces.

Gauthier drew a different comparison from the perspective of Shaw Festival audiences. “I think some people are coming in primed to see another ‘Gaslight,’” she said, alluding to last year’s reboot of another woman-in-trouble drama that played in the same atmospheric theater. “But while a lot of plays come to you, this one asks you to lean forward and listen.”

Those who do will hear a fledgling playwright take a tentative but intriguing step toward many of the themes that would animate her novels — the persistence of class, the fluidity of our personas and how they change from relationship to relationship. “Given her mastery of multiple genres, I think she would have done well had she stuck it out as a playwright,” Chinery said.

That possibility remains unknowable (unless other plays also surface, including a missing title called “The Tightrope” that Wharton alluded to in her letters). Still, “Shadow” offers a titillating look at what she might have done with — and to — the prevailing theatrical styles of the time.

“A lot of people think of realism as the antithesis to artifice, as opposed to melodrama or farce,” Hinton-Davis said. “But I think of realism as the antithesis to idealism, and Wharton excelled at that. I see her as a wonderful satirist.”

Inga Swenson, whose acting talent, striking looks and versatile singing voice brought her success on the Broadway stage in the 1950s and ’60s, and who years later rode a phony German accent to sitcom stardom as the cook on the long-running sitcom “Benson,” died on July 23 in Los Angeles. She was 90.

The Television Academy posted news of her death, at a care facility.

Ms. Swenson, who studied theater at Northwestern University, started out as a stage actress. In 1953 and 1954, she and her husband, Lowell Harris, whom she had met and married while at Northwestern, appeared in productions at the Playhouse, Eagles Mere, in north central Pennsylvania, including Clifford Odets’s “The Country Girl,” in which they played a husband and wife.

Ms. Swenson made her New York debut in November 1954 with an Off Broadway troupe called the Shakespearewrights, playing Olivia in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”

“I had these gorgeous gowns because I was fun to costume,” she told the podcast “Behind the Curtain: Broadway’s Living Legends” in 2019. “They loved a 5-foot-10 skinny woman with narrow shoulders.”

That performance landed her an agent, and in 1956 she made her Broadway debut in the musical revue “New Faces of 1956.” Also in the cast was Maggie Smith, who was just beginning her lustrous career.

Ms. Swenson’s biggest Broadway success came in 1963, when she was cast in a leading role in “110 in the Shade,” which had music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones, the duo responsible for the long-running musical “The Fantasticks.” (Mr. Jones died this month.) The book was by N. Richard Nash, based on his play “The Rainmaker.” Ms. Swenson was Lizzie Curry, a supposedly average-looking young woman who is beginning to think she will never find love.

“The tears seem to fall interminably from the big blue eyes of Inga Swenson,” Howard Taubman wrote in his review in The New York Times, “who has to pretend that she is Lizzie, the plain Curry girl, too honest to use female wiles and too homely to attract a man. It’s quite a job of make-believe for Miss Swenson, who is attractive and talented.”

The show ran for 330 performances, then went on the road. It earned Ms. Swenson a Tony Award nomination for best actress in a musical. It also pitted her against the Broadway hitmaker David Merrick, who produced the show.

“110 in the Shade” ended with an onstage rainstorm, and during the curtain call at a performance in April 1964, Ms. Swenson slipped on a puddle and seriously injured an ankle. The injury troubled her for months, and she filed a million-dollar lawsuit against Mr. Merrick, contending that the puddle was a result of faulty set construction.

Later that year, when the show traveled to San Francisco, she told The San Francisco Examiner that she and Mr. Merrick remained friends and that the suit was aimed not at him but at his insurance company. How the matter was resolved is lost in the mists of time.

Ms. Swenson returned to Broadway in 1965 in “Baker Street,” a musical Sherlock Holmes yarn, earning another Tony nomination for best actress in a musical. By that point she had also begun working in the movies, including roles in “Advise & Consent” in 1962 and “The Miracle Worker,” in which she played the mother of Helen Keller, Patty Duke’s character, the same year.

In 1978, Ms. Swenson landed a recurring role in a season of the television comedy “Soap,” and when the same producing team was casting the sitcom “Benson,” a “Soap” spinoff whose title character (played by Robert Guillaume) ran a governor’s household, she auditioned, using a German accent.

“I went in there, read with an accent and they fell off their chairs,” she said on the podcast. She won the role of Gretchen Kraus, a cook and perpetual thorn in Benson’s side. The show ran for eight seasons, and Ms. Swenson was nominated for the supporting-actress Emmy three times.

Inga Swenson was born on Dec. 29, 1932, in Omaha to A.C.R. and Geneva Swenson. Her father was a prominent lawyer and an honorary Swedish consul, and her mother was prominent in Omaha social circles.

Her parents attended a Congregational church that had five choirs, and her performing life began when she tried out for one as a child, impressing church officials.

“They learned that I had a pretty voice and I could make the parishioners weep,” she said on the podcast.

Her father died in a car crash in 1948. Soon after, she landed the role of Maid Marian in her high school’s production of the operetta “Robin Hood,” which helped her through her grief.

“Giving me that role saved my life,” she said. “I had something to do. I had something to think about. I had people telling me I was wonderful.”

Fifteen years later, her singing was good enough to get her cast in “110 in the Shade,” despite some tough competition.

“Everybody wanted to play Lizzie,” she said on “Behind the Curtain.” “When I went to audition, Barbra Streisand was there.”

Ms. Swenson’s survivors include her husband and a son, Mark Harris.

Ms. Swenson said she didn’t often get considered for comic roles because of her elegant looks.

“People take one look and say: ‘You’re not funny,’” she said in a 1983 interview. “‘You don’t even have a funny face.’”

She proved such assessments wrong on “Benson,” which was filmed in front of a live audience.

“That was not phony laughter,” she said on “Behind the Curtain.” “There wasn’t a sign that went up and said, ‘Laugh.’ People laughed because we were funny.”

Lea Salonga was feeling under the weather earlier this month.

“I had to miss shows, which is unfortunate,” she said before one of her final performances in the Broadway disco musical “Here Lies Love.” “But I was still able to stand over a stove and cook this soup that had a lot of garlic and a lot of ginger,” she recalled during a phone interview from her Manhattan home. “It’s called tinola, which is a Filipino chicken soup. It’s what would be cooked every time I was sick at home.”

That connection to the Philippines — where Salonga was born and raised — is one she also feels with “Here Lies Love,” which recounts the rise and fall of the country’s ousted leader and first lady, Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos.

“Normally, if I’m watching a theater piece, I could just feel whatever feelings there are, or that the show wants me to feel,” said Salonga, 52, who on Saturday finishes her guest run as Aurora Aquino, the mother of Benigno Aquino Jr., Ferdinand’s political rival. “But with something like this, where there is actual history of my country entwined in the story, my brain didn’t know what to do.”

Though Salonga has had a long and distinguished Broadway career, winning a Tony Award in 1991 for her performance in “Miss Saigon” as the doomed Vietnamese mother Kim, “Here Lies Love” is the first time she has played a Filipino onstage and the first time she has served as a producer.

Salonga, who next heads to London to begin rehearsals for the West End musical revue “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” discussed 10 of her cultural essentials, including her surprise love affair with BTS and how Alex Newell turned her world upside down in “Shucked.” These are edited excerpts.

1

PlayStation 5

It’s a great way for me to escape after a show, to kind of cleanse my mind, especially if I’m doing a show that’s exhausting mentally and emotionally. Lately I’ve been playing Horizon Forbidden West; I still have to finish the downloadable content.

2

BTS

About six months into the pandemic, I saw “Dynamite.” I can’t remember how I stumbled onto it, but I couldn’t move and I was like, “I have to finish this now.” The dancing and the synchronization and the charm — obviously, they’re beautiful people. It was a great way to find joy and something to look forward to when I woke up for the day in the midst of the world falling apart.

3

Leche Flan

When I was growing up in the Philippines, my grandma would make leche flan, which was always so creamy and so delicious. So over the pandemic, when I was living in the Philippines, I learned how to make it. I would send samples of it over to my mother’s house to taste-test, and she would say, “No, that’s too sweet, can you bring down the sugar content?” When I finally got it right, I had to make sure I had written the recipe down!

4

Essential Oils

They help make me feel relaxed and grounded. You can choose different ones depending on what you feel you need — sometimes I need a little respiratory help, so there are certain oils I’ll either diffuse or massage or rub onto my body, which calm my mind. I gifted everyone in the company of “Here Lies Love” with a little vial of something to remind everyone to just breathe.

5

Cute Pajamas

Sometimes I don’t really want to dress in a pair of jeans and a shirt to go down and pick something up from the communal pantry in a hotel. If I’m wearing cute pajamas, I can throw on a hoodie or a jacket, and I’ll still look presentable. My cousin gifted me “Family Guy” pajamas — a Stewie T-shirt and matching pants.

6

Portable Peripherals

I bring a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse to use when I’m traveling, which make it much easier to type. Because I text bilingually sometimes, a voice memo is not able to grab everything.

7

Over-the-Ear Headphones

As much as I love the portability of my earbuds, my ears tend to get irritated after lengthy use. I have the Apple AirPods Max in light green, which are over-the-ear, Bluetooth-enabled and comfortable. I like that there’s a button you can just push so you can hear what’s going on around you.

8

‘Forensic Files’

I find things like chromatography and DNA analysis fascinating. But also, Peter Thomas’s voice has lulled me to sleep more times than I can count.

9

‘Steven Universe’

I just adore it for its themes of queer acceptance and girl power. Not to mention the number of musical theater folks that voice characters on it, including Patti LuPone and Christine Ebersole.

10

Alex Newell in ‘Shucked’

Dear God, Alex Newell is every single thing. That is a cultural reset to see what it’s like when this superstar stops the show and commands a standing ovation in the middle of the first half. But it’s Alex Newell — of course the show’s going to stop!