| Happy Tonys Sunday! This year’s slate of nominated performers is wonderfully varied, from the breakout debuts (one of my favorites was Alden Ehrenreich in the wickedly funny Becky Shaw) to Broadway mainstays taking victory laps. In the latter camp are the likes of Joshua Henry for Ragtime, Kelli O’Hara for Fallen Angels, Laurie Metcalf for Death of a Salesman, and Metcalf’s Willy Loman, Nathan Lane.
In April, I went to Salesman’s opening night at the Winter Garden Theatre with my dad. To my shame, I had never seen or read Arthur Miller’s canonical play, though I had seen three of the revival’s stars—Lane, Metcalf, and Christopher Abbott—onstage before. Well, reader, the production brought me to tears, surely representing some of the very finest work that Lane has done in his very fine career.
In his honor, this weekend we’re turning back the clock to 1996, when Bruce Weber (the arts journalist, not the photographer!) profiled Lane for our March issue. At the time, Mike Nichols’s The Birdcage was about to be released (“I pretend to be the wife and mother… I look like a young Barbara Bush”); Lane was starring in Stephen Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum at the St. James Theatre; and he was smarting from his rift with Terrence McNally over the film adaptation of Love! Valour! Compassion!. There was a lot going on.
Lane has stiff competition tonight from Every Brilliant Thing’s Daniel Radcliffe, Punch’s Will Harrison, Oedipus’s Mark Strong, and perhaps especially Giant’s John Lithgow. He also, in fairness, already has three Tonys at home. But whatever happens, he’ll forever be our greatest Starina. |
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