Royal Family Post!
The Tangle of Branches in a Royal Tree
ROSEMARY HARRIS has been watching a significant chunk of her life flash before her eyes, and it’s played by Jan Maxwell. Ms. Harris, 82, has the role of Fanny Cavendish, the spicy matriarch, in a new production of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s “Royal Family.” Ms. Maxwell, 30 years her junior, is Julie Cavendish, Fanny’s daughter - the role Ms. Harris very much made her own the last time the sharp-eyed comedy, about a grand theater dynasty and the histrionics it thrives on, played Broadway, in 1975-76. The 1927 original was intended to satirize the Barrymores. This one, now in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, opens on Thursday.
Thickening the onstage aura even more are offstage theater genes. The British-born Ms. Harris is mother to Jennifer Ehle, last seen in New York in “The Coast of Utopia” and due to star in February opposite John Lithgow in Second Stage’s “Mr. & Mrs. Fitch.” “Of course John’s father, Arthur,” Ms. Harris said, “was himself a great director.” Seated with Ms. Maxwell in an upstairs lounge at the Friedman, she was wearing a newsboy cap, which almost seemed to tip.
Ms. Maxwell is the sister of Richard Maxwell, the director and playwright. She is married to the actor and director Robert Emmet Lunney. Her most recent New York appearance was in the 2008 production of “To Be or Not to Be” - inspired by the movie about an acting troupe in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Then there’s Doug Hughes, the play’s director, the Tony-winning son of the actors Barnard Hughes, who died in 2006, and Helen Stenborg, who is now in “Vigil” at the DR2 Theater. Kaufman’s daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider, and Julie Gilbert, Ferber’s great-niece, attended the first rehearsal, in August. “We’re all joined at the hip,” Ms. Harris said.
She and Ms. Maxwell are both struck by how the play and its characters, while still blithely set in the Jazz Age and a frightfully large apartment, have with time acquired softer edges and greater emotional shadings. “It captures the warmth, chaos, fun, love, self-mockery and humanity of being in the theater,” Ms. Maxwell said.
Lynne Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Theater Club, which is producing the play, first saw “The Royal Family” in 1976 and said its multitiered view of family, career choices and imperfect stardom had such a lasting impact that she considered directing this production. But Ms. Harris’s time-bending return made Ms. Meadow turn instead to Mr. Hughes and his similarly stage-steeped origins. “I gave Doug his first job out of college,” she said, “and I can still quote back to him the stories he used to tell about his parents.”
Mr. Hughes has called his career choice “Oedipal revenge.”
Ms. Harris and Ms. Maxwell have formed an interesting pair. While Ms. Maxwell is the far taller and more salty of the two, and a glamorous Julie, the words she gets in when in the company of Ms. Harris are mostly edgewise. Ms. Harris, whose first role, at 4, was a queen and who won a Tony for her Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1966 production of “The Lion in Winter,” said, “I obviously like playing royalty.”
Though born the same year as “The Royal Family,” Ms. Harris said the closest she ever came to the Barrymores was while staying with a girlfriend renting John Barrymore’s former town house in Greenwich Village. “He had made its second floor sort of his aerie,” she said. “There aren’t dynasties like that anymore - although, look at Meryl Streep and her children, and the Redgraves still, who just so tragically lost one of theirs. I guess maybe Angelina Jolie and her father, but they don’t talk to each other, do they, so I wouldn’t call that a dynasty.”
Ms. Harris realizes her turn as Julie has remained vivid for many, herself included, especially since a version filmed for PBS is still in circulation. But, she emphasized strenuously, that hasn’t interfered with the onstage dynamic between her and Ms. Maxwell. “I have enough to do saying my own lines without taking hers,” she said.
“If she does, I step on her foot,” Ms. Maxwell said jokingly.
In college, Ms. Maxwell said, she was a close student of the PBS broadcast with Ms. Harris’s Julie. “I watched it on my tiny black-and-white TV,” she said. “I remember feeling the possibility of a future in the theater it gave me. This profession can be so hard. But this production has reaffirmed my belief in it.”
To Mr. Hughes, the meshing of the two actresses onstage hasn’t been a question of acting style, which he says he doesn’t believe in. “It has been about how they draw on their own distinct beings,” he said, and also their experiences as women of the theater, daughters and mothers.
On the other hand, Kaufman and Ferber turned out not be the last to suggest the ways a life in theater can destabilize the balance between work and everything else. “You can be torn apart from your family,” Ms. Maxwell said, “and that can be heartbreaking. On this show I’m doing my own hair, at home, so I can be with my son.”
Ms. Harris remembers a tiny Jennifer Ehle drawing of herself with her father on one piece of paper; her mother, alone, on another. She was surprised, she said, when her daughter announced, at 14, that she wanted to be an actress. “Of course, I had always taken her with me a lot. We just stuck her in our pockets and off we went. “
It’s a very Fanny line.
Ms. Maxwell said, “I hope to play Fanny someday.”
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Kelli Barrett Rolls from Rocker to Classic Ingenue in The Royal Family
Age: 25
Hometown: Virginia Beach, Virginia
Currently: Making her Broadway debut as Gwen Cavendish, a third generation stage actress who’s not sure she wants to carry on the family business in Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family.
Girl Power: Though she wasn’t raised in a Royal Family-style stage clan, Barrett laughingly says she was born to perform. “I had this little Fisher-Price stand-up microphone and I would set up shows in the living room, singing Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston songs. My mom said, ‘She’ll either be a lawyer or an actress’ because I loved to argue.” Barrett speaks with pride of her mother, a single parent who worked as a bartender so she could be with Kelli during the day. “Gwen’s journey is similar to my own,” she says of her character, “in that my biological father wasn’t there, and my mother and grandmother were the central figures in my life. I’m forever indebted to them.”
Star-in-Training: “Mommy, I want to do that!” young Kelli declared after seeing a production of Merrily We Roll Along, so her doting mom put her into classes with the Hurrah Players in nearby Norfolk, plus voice lessons with a former Juilliard professor. The budding performer went to high school at the Governor’s School for the Arts, then entered the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, landing a role in Bright Lights, Big City at the Prince Theater her junior year. The show’s director, Stafford Arima, then tapped her for a regional tour of the musical Ace. With a semester of college left, she recalls, “I said, ‘You know what? I’m going for it!’ So I moved to New York.”
Rock and a Hard Place: After starring as Louise opposite Karen Mason in a Westchester revival of Gypsy, Barrett morphed into rocker chick Sherrie in the original off-Broadway production of Rock of Ages. When the show transferred to Broadway, however, her role went to Amy Spanger. “At the time, it was difficult to understand,” Barrett admits, “but I had faith that there was a reason for it. I’ve always been a tenacious person. And honestly, since that happened, I’ve done two films, readings of four new shows, a national commercial and now this play. I love that this is my Broadway debut because it shows people that I am serious about acting. It ended up being such a blessing!”
Wilson, Pattinson & Me: While helping develop The Long Goodbye, a musical version of Romeo and Juliet set to songs by the late Jeff Buckley, Barrett managed to nab small roles in a trio of high-profile movies, Confessions of a Shopaholic and the upcoming The Baster and Remember Me. “I play Patrick Wilson’s wife in two funny little scenes [in The Baster]. He is the sweetest guy! He complimented me on Rock of Ages, which was incredible.” As for Remember Me, Barrett has a bar pickup scene with “THE Robert Pattinson,” she says of the Twilight teen idol. “Oh my goodness! I actually made it onto [gossip website] Perez Hilton, in a picture in which he had his arm around me while we were rehearsing. The caption was something like ‘crazy fan tries to get in photo with Robert.’ My manager said, ‘You know you’ve made it when you’re on Perez Hilton.’”
Broadway Royalty: Joining the starry ensemble cast of The Royal Family has been “absolutely life-changing,” says Barrett, who plays the daughter of Jan Maxwell and granddaughter of Rosemary Harris. “Jan has amazing instincts and has taught me to be fearless in the way I approach work. John Glover [as great-uncle Herbert] has taught me that every word matters; it’s almost like he’s making love with the lines as he’s talking. Ana [Gasteyer, as Herbert’s ditzy wife] is a wonderful physical actress. And Rosemary, the way she lifts a line and lets it fall, really defines the music within the dialogue. Believe me, I’ve been taking notes!”
Source
ROSEMARY HARRIS has been watching a significant chunk of her life flash before her eyes, and it’s played by Jan Maxwell. Ms. Harris, 82, has the role of Fanny Cavendish, the spicy matriarch, in a new production of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber’s “Royal Family.” Ms. Maxwell, 30 years her junior, is Julie Cavendish, Fanny’s daughter - the role Ms. Harris very much made her own the last time the sharp-eyed comedy, about a grand theater dynasty and the histrionics it thrives on, played Broadway, in 1975-76. The 1927 original was intended to satirize the Barrymores. This one, now in previews at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater, opens on Thursday.
Thickening the onstage aura even more are offstage theater genes. The British-born Ms. Harris is mother to Jennifer Ehle, last seen in New York in “The Coast of Utopia” and due to star in February opposite John Lithgow in Second Stage’s “Mr. & Mrs. Fitch.” “Of course John’s father, Arthur,” Ms. Harris said, “was himself a great director.” Seated with Ms. Maxwell in an upstairs lounge at the Friedman, she was wearing a newsboy cap, which almost seemed to tip.
Ms. Maxwell is the sister of Richard Maxwell, the director and playwright. She is married to the actor and director Robert Emmet Lunney. Her most recent New York appearance was in the 2008 production of “To Be or Not to Be” - inspired by the movie about an acting troupe in Nazi-occupied Poland.
Then there’s Doug Hughes, the play’s director, the Tony-winning son of the actors Barnard Hughes, who died in 2006, and Helen Stenborg, who is now in “Vigil” at the DR2 Theater. Kaufman’s daughter, Anne Kaufman Schneider, and Julie Gilbert, Ferber’s great-niece, attended the first rehearsal, in August. “We’re all joined at the hip,” Ms. Harris said.
She and Ms. Maxwell are both struck by how the play and its characters, while still blithely set in the Jazz Age and a frightfully large apartment, have with time acquired softer edges and greater emotional shadings. “It captures the warmth, chaos, fun, love, self-mockery and humanity of being in the theater,” Ms. Maxwell said.
Lynne Meadow, artistic director of the Manhattan Theater Club, which is producing the play, first saw “The Royal Family” in 1976 and said its multitiered view of family, career choices and imperfect stardom had such a lasting impact that she considered directing this production. But Ms. Harris’s time-bending return made Ms. Meadow turn instead to Mr. Hughes and his similarly stage-steeped origins. “I gave Doug his first job out of college,” she said, “and I can still quote back to him the stories he used to tell about his parents.”
Mr. Hughes has called his career choice “Oedipal revenge.”
Ms. Harris and Ms. Maxwell have formed an interesting pair. While Ms. Maxwell is the far taller and more salty of the two, and a glamorous Julie, the words she gets in when in the company of Ms. Harris are mostly edgewise. Ms. Harris, whose first role, at 4, was a queen and who won a Tony for her Eleanor of Aquitaine in the 1966 production of “The Lion in Winter,” said, “I obviously like playing royalty.”
Though born the same year as “The Royal Family,” Ms. Harris said the closest she ever came to the Barrymores was while staying with a girlfriend renting John Barrymore’s former town house in Greenwich Village. “He had made its second floor sort of his aerie,” she said. “There aren’t dynasties like that anymore - although, look at Meryl Streep and her children, and the Redgraves still, who just so tragically lost one of theirs. I guess maybe Angelina Jolie and her father, but they don’t talk to each other, do they, so I wouldn’t call that a dynasty.”
Ms. Harris realizes her turn as Julie has remained vivid for many, herself included, especially since a version filmed for PBS is still in circulation. But, she emphasized strenuously, that hasn’t interfered with the onstage dynamic between her and Ms. Maxwell. “I have enough to do saying my own lines without taking hers,” she said.
“If she does, I step on her foot,” Ms. Maxwell said jokingly.
In college, Ms. Maxwell said, she was a close student of the PBS broadcast with Ms. Harris’s Julie. “I watched it on my tiny black-and-white TV,” she said. “I remember feeling the possibility of a future in the theater it gave me. This profession can be so hard. But this production has reaffirmed my belief in it.”
To Mr. Hughes, the meshing of the two actresses onstage hasn’t been a question of acting style, which he says he doesn’t believe in. “It has been about how they draw on their own distinct beings,” he said, and also their experiences as women of the theater, daughters and mothers.
On the other hand, Kaufman and Ferber turned out not be the last to suggest the ways a life in theater can destabilize the balance between work and everything else. “You can be torn apart from your family,” Ms. Maxwell said, “and that can be heartbreaking. On this show I’m doing my own hair, at home, so I can be with my son.”
Ms. Harris remembers a tiny Jennifer Ehle drawing of herself with her father on one piece of paper; her mother, alone, on another. She was surprised, she said, when her daughter announced, at 14, that she wanted to be an actress. “Of course, I had always taken her with me a lot. We just stuck her in our pockets and off we went. “
It’s a very Fanny line.
Ms. Maxwell said, “I hope to play Fanny someday.”
Source
Kelli Barrett Rolls from Rocker to Classic Ingenue in The Royal Family
Age: 25
Hometown: Virginia Beach, Virginia
Currently: Making her Broadway debut as Gwen Cavendish, a third generation stage actress who’s not sure she wants to carry on the family business in Manhattan Theatre Club’s revival of Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family.
Girl Power: Though she wasn’t raised in a Royal Family-style stage clan, Barrett laughingly says she was born to perform. “I had this little Fisher-Price stand-up microphone and I would set up shows in the living room, singing Mariah Carey and Whitney Houston songs. My mom said, ‘She’ll either be a lawyer or an actress’ because I loved to argue.” Barrett speaks with pride of her mother, a single parent who worked as a bartender so she could be with Kelli during the day. “Gwen’s journey is similar to my own,” she says of her character, “in that my biological father wasn’t there, and my mother and grandmother were the central figures in my life. I’m forever indebted to them.”
Star-in-Training: “Mommy, I want to do that!” young Kelli declared after seeing a production of Merrily We Roll Along, so her doting mom put her into classes with the Hurrah Players in nearby Norfolk, plus voice lessons with a former Juilliard professor. The budding performer went to high school at the Governor’s School for the Arts, then entered the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, landing a role in Bright Lights, Big City at the Prince Theater her junior year. The show’s director, Stafford Arima, then tapped her for a regional tour of the musical Ace. With a semester of college left, she recalls, “I said, ‘You know what? I’m going for it!’ So I moved to New York.”
Rock and a Hard Place: After starring as Louise opposite Karen Mason in a Westchester revival of Gypsy, Barrett morphed into rocker chick Sherrie in the original off-Broadway production of Rock of Ages. When the show transferred to Broadway, however, her role went to Amy Spanger. “At the time, it was difficult to understand,” Barrett admits, “but I had faith that there was a reason for it. I’ve always been a tenacious person. And honestly, since that happened, I’ve done two films, readings of four new shows, a national commercial and now this play. I love that this is my Broadway debut because it shows people that I am serious about acting. It ended up being such a blessing!”
Wilson, Pattinson & Me: While helping develop The Long Goodbye, a musical version of Romeo and Juliet set to songs by the late Jeff Buckley, Barrett managed to nab small roles in a trio of high-profile movies, Confessions of a Shopaholic and the upcoming The Baster and Remember Me. “I play Patrick Wilson’s wife in two funny little scenes [in The Baster]. He is the sweetest guy! He complimented me on Rock of Ages, which was incredible.” As for Remember Me, Barrett has a bar pickup scene with “THE Robert Pattinson,” she says of the Twilight teen idol. “Oh my goodness! I actually made it onto [gossip website] Perez Hilton, in a picture in which he had his arm around me while we were rehearsing. The caption was something like ‘crazy fan tries to get in photo with Robert.’ My manager said, ‘You know you’ve made it when you’re on Perez Hilton.’”
Broadway Royalty: Joining the starry ensemble cast of The Royal Family has been “absolutely life-changing,” says Barrett, who plays the daughter of Jan Maxwell and granddaughter of Rosemary Harris. “Jan has amazing instincts and has taught me to be fearless in the way I approach work. John Glover [as great-uncle Herbert] has taught me that every word matters; it’s almost like he’s making love with the lines as he’s talking. Ana [Gasteyer, as Herbert’s ditzy wife] is a wonderful physical actress. And Rosemary, the way she lifts a line and lets it fall, really defines the music within the dialogue. Believe me, I’ve been taking notes!”
Source