Dimming the lights

Looking up towards the Essex House sign. 10:00 PM. Photo: JH.

March 20, 2002. First day of Spring. Yesterday was a rainy day in New York. Last night I was invited by Shirley Lord Rosenthal to the opening night of the revival of “West Side Story” at the Palace Theatre.

Big list of big producers to get this classic back on the boards: Kevin McCollum, James Nederlander, Jefffrey Seller, Terry Allen Kramer, Sander Jacobs, Roy Furman/Jill Furman Willis, Freddy DeMann, Robyn Goodman/Walt Grossman, Hal Luftig, Roy Miller, The Weinstein Company, Broadway Across America. As you can see, it takes an army to get a massive musical onto the stage today.

The show which first opened to great acclaim in 1957 starring Larry Kert, Carol Lawrence and Chita Rivera, was conceived, choreographed and directed by the great Jerome Robbins, with music by the great Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by the great Stephen Sondheim. The emphasis is not hyperbole as this half-century masterpiece presents proof in every performance.

The new production was directed by the show’s librettist, Arthur Laurents. I never saw the original although there were many people in the audience last night who did. Jill Krementz told me she took her mother to see the show right after it opened. Pat Schoenfeld told me she saw it with her husband Gerry Schoenfeld opening night. She specifically remembered the night because at the beginning of the show Gerry was feeling very ill and finally had to go home during intermission. Despite that, Pat stayed to the end because the show was so good. Alas, she said, Gerry never got to see the entire production – probably one of the few shows in the last sixty years of Broadway that he didn’t see in its entirety. After the show last night Pat pronounced the new production was as wonderful as the original and every bit as great as the original.

This is a great great show, every bit as compelling as the romantic tale of Romeo and Juliet (on which the Robbins idea is based). It is an American opera and ballet in every sense of the words, and Broadway too.

The Arthur Laurents version has some alterations emphasizing the ethnicity of the characters. Two of the songs are sung in Spanish – “I Feel Pretty” (“Siento Hermosa") and “A Boy Like That/I Have a Love” ("Un Hombre Asi"). The program includes the original Sondheim lyrics of those songs. A portion of the dialogue is also in Spanish, providing an unrequired (for English speaking audiences) but useful cultural addition that enhances its modern universality.

The curtain of the Palace.

It is darker, Pat Schoenfeld recalled, than the original, with an alteration of the final act. The Robbins choreography was reproduced by Joey McKneely who was introduced to “West Side Story” by Robbins himself when McKneely was dancing in “Jerome Robbins’ Broadway.” It is amazing. I’ve never seen a show where the dancing commands your emotional attention the way it does in this one. It’s powerful, modern, balletic, dynamic, challenging and awesome. Get the picture?

The cast is wonderful. The two leads Matt Cavanaugh (Tony) and Josefina Scaglione (Maria) were very contemporary and with beautiful voices – a combination of Cavanaugh’s “pop” style voice and Scaglione’s soaring operatic soprano. Beautiful. The audience went wild over and over again throughout the show, and when the rumble came it was so realistically fearsome that many in the audience real fear for the performers.

The final bow

Last night all of Broadway dimmed its lights at 8 o’clock in memoriam of Natasha Richardson who died suddenly and tragically from a brain injury after a freak accident on a ski slope in Canada. The shock of her death affected many people over the past few days. The Telegraph of London has provided an excellent obituary of the beautiful actress, a shining star of the younger generation of three generations of theatrical stars.

We are accompanying this re-printed obituary with a portfolio of photographs (by Patrick McMullan) taken over the years of the actress with a variety of people – friends, co-workers, associates, her husband, her family members and again her husband.

Natasha and Liam

From the Telegraph:

Natasha Richardson, who has died aged 45 in New York after being injured in a skiing accident in Canada, was born into one of Britain's most powerful thespian dynasties and, although she became a star in her own right, often felt haunted by her pedigree.

This was hardly surprising, for profiles of Natasha Richardson – "Tash" to her friends – tended to define her by a web of family relationships: she was the granddaughter of Sir Michael Redgrave and Rachel Kempson; the daughter of Tony Richardson and Vanessa Redgrave; the niece of Corin and Lynn Redgrave; the cousin of Jemma Redgrave; the sister of Joely Richardson; the ex-wife of the producer Robert Fox (brother of James and Edward); and finally the wife of Liam Neeson.

It was fortunate, of course, that acting was not only in her blood but that she was also good at it. She began her career in earnest after winning a bit-part as a "young whore" in the 1984 television series Ellis Island, and won the London Drama Critics' award for most promising newcomer for her 1985 West End debut as Nina in Chekhov's Seagull, in which her mother played Nina's mother, Arkadina.

She graduated to the screen as Mary Shelley in Ken Russell's Gothic (1986), a journey through a highly sexual garden of horrors, then progressed to big American feature films such as Patty Hearst (1988) and The Comfort of Strangers (1990) before moving to Broadway. In 1998 her performance in Sam Mendes's Broadway production of Cabaret scooped the Tony, the Outer Critics' Circle and the Drama Desk awards for best actress.

Tall and elegant with large, myopic green eyes and a deep, smoky voice (likened by one writer to "a caress of honey and iron filings"), Natasha Richardson could come over as an intimidating beauty. Yet interviewers quickly found that she was unaffected, intelligent and warm, and that her confidence as an actress belied deep personal insecurities.

She appeared to be so haunted by the family name that she upped sticks from London to New York in the early 1990s, and she often expressed the hope that neither of her two children by Liam Neeson would follow their parents into acting. Yet it is hard to resist the conclusion that she was not so much trying to escape an inherited burden of expectations as to place a distance between herself and the legacy of her upbringing.

Natasha Jane Richardson was born in London on May 11 1963 and landed her first role at the age of four, when she played her mother's bridesmaid in The Charge of the Light Brigade, directed by her father. But life at home was far from idyllic. When she was three, and her sister Joely one, their parents divorced. Later she recalled thinking that if she saved up all her pocket money and sent her mother red roses from her father, it would get them back together again. After the split the two girls spent school holidays between their mother's semi-detached London home and Le Nid du Duc, their father's rambling estate in Provence.

Vanessa Redgrave, meanwhile, became increasingly involved in extreme Left-wing politics, leaving Natasha to fend off barbed remarks in the playground. By the time Natasha was nine her mother had donated so much of her earnings to the Workers' Revolutionary Party that they had to move to a smaller house in a less salubrious area of London.

The chaotic nature of family life led Natasha to assume many of the family's domestic responsibilities. Armed with a Brownies cookery badge, she kept house in London and, on visits to her father, would sometimes cook for parties of 15 or 20. "I was a caretaker for other people," she recalled. "I loaded myself with responsibility, I grew up probably too soon and was… very boring and middle-aged as a teenager."

Natasha was closer to her father, and it was he who insisted that she should be educated not at the local comprehensive but at the French Lycée and at St Paul's Girls' School. When she was 11, however, she found out that he was bisexual. At the time she was upset, "because of the social stigma", though it soon ceased to be a problem. When he died of an Aids-related illness in 1991 she was grief-stricken.

As a child, Natasha channelled her unhappiness into comfort eating and, though she was never obese, she was overweight, a fact that blighted her adolescence. She did not shed the excess pounds until she was in her early twenties, and throughout her career she had a tendency to balloon in weight. She fortified her willpower with cigarettes and Diet Coke.

Despite all her insecurities, by the time she arrived at St Paul's, Natasha had already set her heart on becoming an actress, and at the age of 17 she auditioned for the Central School of Speech and Drama without admitting that she was a Redgrave. She honed her skills in repertory in Leeds and made her screen debut in Every Picture Tells a Story in 1984.

She starred opposite Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth in A Month in the Country (1987), directed by Pat O'Connor, and her role in Ken Russell's Gothic had got her noticed by the director Paul Schrader, who offered her her first big American feature film, Patty Hearst (1988). There followed The Comfort of Strangers (1990, and also by Schrader); Fat Man and Little Boy (1989), about the making of the atom bomb; and The Handmaid's Tale (1990), in which she played opposite Robert Duvall and Faye Dunaway. But she struggled to assert her own identity.

In his memoirs, Tony Richardson recalled her performance in The Seagull, noting that she had "the same quality of being able to communicate emotion and let emotion flow through fully and directly that her mother has" – a constant theme of reviews.

During The Seagull's West End run she had fallen in love with the play's producer, Robert Fox, 11 years her senior, whom she eventually married in 1990. The same year she won a London Theatre Critics' Award for her work in Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie. When a Broadway production was planned, Natasha Richardson suggested the Irish actor Liam Neeson to be her co-star.

In 1992 she divorced Fox, moved to New York and subsequently followed Neeson to Poland while he filmed Schindler's List. They appeared together with Jodie Foster in Michael Apted's Nell (1994) and married later the same year. Fox was so devastated that he later spoke in public of his grief.

The crisis in Natasha Richardson's love life came at a fortuitous time, for she was finding the constant comparisons with her mother increasingly irksome. "In New York I could be me," she said. "I could be my own person. I was appreciated for who I was and I felt a great sense of freedom." The move to New York enabled her to build her reputation on Broadway, where her other credits included A Streetcar Named Desire (in which she played Blanche DuBois) and Patrick Marber's Closer, in which she was Anna.

Her film career continued fitfully with roles in Widows' Peak (1994); in the successful 1998 remake of The Parent Trap, in which she played the mother of 12-year-old Lindsay Lohan; and in Maid In Manhattan (2002, with Jennifer Lopez), in which she played the woman Ralph Fiennes does not choose.

In 2005 Natasha Richardson was executive producer and star of Asylum, a film based on the novel by Patrick McGrath, in which she played the bored and unfulfilled wife of a psychiatrist in a mental asylum who starts a passionate but dangerous affair with one of the inmates.

Natasha Richardson always remained close to her family, and her years in the United States, where she took full citizenship, seemed to have freed her from their shadow. In 2005 she played a Russian countess who is drawn towards Ralph Fiennes's blind former American diplomat in the Merchant Ivory film The White Countess, which also starred her mother and her aunt, Lynn Redgrave. In Evening (2007) she appeared with her mother as a middle-aged daughter coming to terms with her mother's imminent death.

In 2005 she returned to London to play the unhappily married Ellida Wangel in Trevor Nunn's production of Ibsen's Lady From the Sea – a role famously played by her mother.

Natasha Richardson is survived by Liam Neeson and their two sons.