Give My Regards To Malibu

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

A year ago, Broadway was mired in the slough of despond, waiting out the waning weeks of one of its skimpiest seasons and wondering whether the Great White Way would ever glisten again. As so often in the theater, the death rattle turned out to be just a cough. This season the number of new productions has shot up more than a third, from 28 to 38. Total attendance since Jan. 1 has been 13.4% higher than in the same period last year. The range of fare has been unusually broad, from tap dance to Ibsen, from sitcom to Shakespeare. But the biggest buzz is about the abundance of high-profile movie and TV stars who have returned to the risks and rigors of the live stage.

Want to share in the sweaty embraces of Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange? They are entwined in A Streetcar Named Desire. Prefer the wry wit of Alan Alda or the in-your-face comic angst of Judd Hirsch? They play beleaguered husbands and failed fathers in splendid new tragicomedies from Neil Simon and Herb Gardner. If your taste runs to grandes dames, Rosemary Harris enacts the mean matriarch in Simon's previous play, Lost in Yonkers, while Lynn Redgrave evokes the aggrieved wife of a self-anointed genius in Ibsen's The Master Builder.

Keith Carradine continues in the title role of the musical The Will Rogers Follies, and Cyd Charisse has re-emerged via Grand Hotel. In coming weeks they are being joined in musical stardom by Raul Julia and pop singer Sheena Easton in Man of La Mancha, Peter Gallagher (of the movie sex, lies, and videotape) in Guys and Dolls and Gregory Hines in Jelly's Last Jam, a portrait of composer Jelly Roll Morton. Next month Pulitzer prizewinner August Wilson's subtly tragic and robustly comic Two Trains Running will feature Larry Fishburne from the film Boyz N the Hood, while the Australian drama Shimada, about a Japanese-led corporate takeover, will offer Ellen Burstyn, Ben Gazzara and Estelle Parsons. Al Pacino opens in two one-act plays in late May.

Other recent limited runs featured Martin Sheen in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, Rob Lowe and Tony Randall in a Feydeau farce (both shows from Randall's new National Actors Theater), Jane Alexander in The Visit and, most opulently, Joan Collins, whose Private Lives ended last week. Says Harvey Sabinson, executive director of the League of American Theaters and Producers: "None of us who have been around a long time can recall a moment when so many major Hollywood stars came to Broadway."

Of all the current displays of star power, the most profligate is Death and the Maiden, which opened last week. A political thriller cum debate by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman about the difficulties of shifting from dictatorship to democracy, it stars five-time Oscar nominee Glenn Close as a woman raped and tortured by the old regime who wants to hunt down her abusers. Oscar winner Gene Hackman plays the genial doctor who may or may not have been the blindfolded woman's chief tormenter 15 years ago. Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss portrays her husband, a liberal politician who seeks to preserve the uneasy peace of the present even if it means suppressing the truth of the past. Although the setting is described as "probably" Chile, the play's polemics apply to a long, sad roster of other places where the price of newfound freedom is forceful forgetting. London critics have hailed a hard- edged production there as "grasping the pulse of the century."

Mike Nichols' staging, alas, is too ornate and stately, its pace slowed by pregnant pauses and suspense-draining scene changes. Moreover, the actors seem weirdly naturalistic for so polemic a text. Close never gets crazy enough for the audience to doubt whether she is right, as must happen to sustain tension. Dreyfuss goes right to the expedient, exploitative core of the husband without visiting the needed surface idealism and charm. Hackman's performance does not engage guilt or innocence; it remains stuck at bafflement throughout. These are high-voltage talents giving low-wattage portrayals.

Straight plays, especially on glum topics, are notoriously hard to presell. But Dorfman's meditation opened to a musical-size advance of $3.4 million, and mixed notices had no evident impact at the box office. Streetcar has amassed an impressive $2.4 million advance, despite having been revived on Broadway just four years ago. Randall's subscription-based troupe, which touts marquee names for each production, has somehow filled seats for three abominable revivals in a row, including last week's Master Builder.

What accounts for the star stampede? The obvious answer is just such box- office magic. Impresarios often conclude, as did Roger Berlind of Death and the Maiden and Richard Seader of Shimada, that a new script by an unknown author absolutely requires star clout. Says Berlind: "The average straight play costs more than $1 million to produce. Doing one on Broadway without the protection of name recognizability is almost a lost business." Seader is even blunter: "We were originally considering off-Broadway. I don't think we would have done Shimada on Broadway without stars."

With revivals, the text is virtually an afterthought save as a star vehicle. Says producer Charles Duggan of Private Lives: "There are two ways to compete for audiences against films and videotapes. One is with spectacle, and the other is with star power." Even so, Duggan concedes, there can be too much of a good thing. He booked Collins at a time when he expected to be offering audiences a unique touch of glamour. But a jumble of long-discussed projects from various producers all came to pass at about the same time, and suddenly rival stars were everywhere.

For some actors, the move to Broadway reflects recession cutbacks in Hollywood. Actors who cannot command film work at their asking price often prefer to switch to the stage, which the industry views as a prestigious but separate business, rather than agree to slip back down Hollywood's money ladder. Not that Broadway pay is exactly monastic. While Pacino will work for $1,000 a week in a nonprofit house, some stars command up to 10% of box-office gross, as much as $20,000 a week. For many, the choice is artistic. They want | to play classic roles, work with particular directors or co-stars, or demonstrate talent in a way films do not allow. Baldwin, for example, spurned a reported $1 million for a sequel to The Hunt for Red October to take on Stanley Kowalski, the role that made Marlon Brando. Says Baldwin: "It's thrilling."

Although star casting seems an instant boon, drawing in new and younger audiences and allowing more plays to have larger-scale life, some theater leaders fret that they may be doing themselves long-term harm, creating a costly or even unsustainable expectation that every show will have a splash of celebrity. Says Emanuel Azenberg, who produces Neil Simon's work: "The real problems the theater has are not solved by a momentary sense of breath that the stars bring us." Instead of thinking about how to cut costs and reach a broader audience, producers who employ stars typically have to accede to higher salaries and shorter runs and thus raise ticket prices -- to a $50 top for Streetcar and Maiden -- to try to recoup faster.

There's nothing wrong with star casting when the role fits, as it does with Baldwin and Alda and Hirsch. When a show really goes wrong, performers are rarely the problem, anyway. Last week's biggest Broadway fiasco was a ponderously staged pedantic pageant from stage luminaries -- writer John Guare, actors Stockard Channing and James Naughton and director Sir Peter Hall, the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Like all Guare's plays, Four Baboons Adoring the Sun deals with ordinary people's inability to accept ordinariness, their yearning for mythic and epic significance. But it thwarts itself by hanging its plot on a somber and respectful treatment of the abrupt sexual infatuation and love-suicide pact of a pair of 13-year-olds. Shakespeare could bring it off in Verona. In Guare's rural Sicily, it seems mere wind. Mae West couldn't make it worse, and Richard Burbage couldn't make it better.

With reporting by Janice C. Simpson/New York