An All-Star Broadway Season

Cynthia Nixon plays a scholar battling cancer in Wit

	Matthew Broderick and Kelli O’Hara, stars of Nice Work If You Can Get It
	Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis in The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess
	John LIthgow, star of The Columnist

One of the great things about theater, says Cynthia Nixon, is how it exposes the soft emotional underbelly of characters who think of themselves, at least on some level, as immune to love, pain, or loss. “Their vulnerability takes them by surprises,” says the actress. “It’s such a wonderful challenge to play a person of so much strength and intellectual power but who has really lost a sense of herself.”

The actress was speaking of her new role as Dr. Vivian Bearing, the astringent scholar thrown off her stride by a diagnosis of ovarian cancer in the Broadway production of Wit. But she could also have been referring to a host of other star-driven plays warming up Broadway as New York emerges from a winter chill. This includes a revival of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, directed by Mike Nichols and starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Willy Loman, and Andrew Garfield as troubled son Biff; John Lithgow, as the powerful pundit Joseph Alsop caught up in a sex scandal in David Auburn’s The Columnist; Audra McDonald in The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, a new adaptation of the American classic; and Matthew Broderick in Nice Work If You Can Get It, as a 1920s playboy in an extravaganza with songs also taken from the Gershwin songbook.

In Wit, Nixon says that Dr. Bearing’s intellectual passion for the 17th-century English poet John Donne proves to be an inadequate defense against the bad news she receives on a doctor’s visit, but it does cause her to summon unexpected courage to meet the challenge as well as reconcile with ghosts of the past. Says the actress, “She’s someone who meets her sudden vulnerability with a heroic rage.”

In preparation for the role, Nixon read a lot about the late Gilda Radner’s brave fight against ovarian cancer. And although Nixon herself is a breast cancer survivor, she says that her experience doesn’t remotely compare to the death sentence Dr. Bearing must endure. “We become pretty small in the face of such a diagnosis,” says Nixon. “It takes all the reserves of strength you can muster, and she does that, eventually, with grace and wisdom. What actor wouldn’t want to play her?”

The writer Joseph Alsop must also call upon on his reserves of strength in David Auburn’s retelling of an intense chapter from his celebrated life, which begins when the Soviets entrap him in a homosexual liaison with a handsome young Russian in a Moscow hotel in 1957. The episode was especially humiliating because the influential pundit was a fierce cold warrior when tensions between the US and Moscow were at their height. “He manages to weather the scandal,” says Lithgow, “because he had a tremendous sense of his own righteousness and a monumental arrogance.”

This stemmed in part from his patrician American background, which made his sexual behavior all the more reckless. “We all have sexual urges, and suddenly you have the most rational people behaving most irrationally, denying emotion until it explodes,” says the actor. The fallout colors his relationships in the play, which include those with his wife, his brother Stewart (also a columnist), the journalist David Halberstam, and the young Russian who seduces him. “He’s like a bull in a china shop,” adds Lithgow.

Like Alsop, McDonald is a force of nature as the tempestuous Bess, who shakes up Catfish Row in the Gershwins’ 1935 classic folk opera. With a revised book by Suzan Lori-Parks, this Broadway revival, directed by Diane Paulus, emphasizes the steely survival instincts of its anti-heroine, who was first created in the 1925 Dubose Heyward novel. “She should have been dead by the time the opera starts. That’s what I often think about Bess,” says McDonald of the drug-addicted prostitute. “But come hell or high water, she’s found a way to fight back against all that life has thrown at her.”

McDonald, a four-time Tony Award winner whose performance was highly acclaimed when the production tried out in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last year, says that Bess’ journey is so emotionally, physically, and vocally taxing that she’s glad to be standing by the end of the show. “Despite all her struggles, Bess is transformed by love,” says McDonald of her character’s unlikely romance with the crippled beggar Porgy, played by Norm Lewis. “Whether she holds onto it or not, well, we just don’t know that.”

You can be sure that Broderick, as a Long Island playboy mixed up with bootleggers, will be able to hold onto his romantic interest in Nice Work If You Can Get It. After all, this musical by director-choreographer Kathleen Marshall and writer Joe DiPietro is a paean to all those screwball romantic musicals that once littered Broadway. Broderick considers playing a character who is catnip to the ladies to be something of a welcome, if daunting, opportunity. “I have a line, ‘I’m wealthy and very good-looking, and it turns out to be enough,’ but that means I’ll have to be a little more charming to make up for the fact I’m not that good-looking,” he says with a laugh.

Broderick notes that he has always been drawn to the movies and songs of the 1920s and 1930s, especially those by the Gershwin brothers. “At first glance, they may seem surface-y, but the more you dig, the more you realize that they are deep, too,” he says. That may well be because the Gershwins wrote not only from a tradition of American optimism but also from their Russian-Jewish immigrant roots. “Well, I’m half-Jewish so I always think that things will go wrong,” says Broderick. “The show is not just a joy fest. It’s clever, sarcastic, wry and, hopefully, has real feeling in it.”