Interesting piece about Frank Langella in today's Vulture, written by his biographer, that touches on a recently mooted revival of Kopit's farce:
... he’d poured his heart into a stage revival of Arthur Kopit’s 1962 farce, Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. A year earlier, in a workshop in Times Square, I’d watched as all six-foot-four of him, in pearls and lipstick, his voice pitched high but not too high as Madame Rosepettle, entered, savaging the winded bellhops arranging her luggage in a hotel room as her stuttering son watched.
Kopit had been eager to see his long-forgotten play resurrected with Langella as Mme. Rosepettle. “Frank wanted to do it, and what he thought about how to do it was exactly right,” he says. “He understood how it was about terror, and how Madame Rosepettle was scared. He understood something about it that I thought was absolutely real.” But it was not to be. At the workshop production, I watched as the invited guests squirmed, declining to engage. No producer ever came forward to mount a full production. The project was shelved.
Bummer. |
