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Category Archives: Broadway

Wendy Wasserstein and the Chanel Bonfire Sequel

August 14, 2014

In 1989 I got my first job on Broadway, understudying in The Heidi chronicles. I went on in January of 1990 and then took over my roles in February and began a wonderful nine months with the play.

Researching the sequel to Chanel, “Heart of Glass”, (and trying to remember what happened!) it’s been marvelous to revisit the play I did on Broadway, and learn more about Wendy Wasserstein. I fondly recall her kindness to me, her marvelous laugh, and all those times she took the cast to Sardi’s and Orso. The Heidi Chronicles really stands up – rereading it twenty-five years later. Keep the faith!

RIP Julie Harris

August 26, 2013

Ethel Waters, Carson McCullers, Julie Harris

Julie Harris, a great actress and one of my true idols, has died. She was an actor who seemed to have not so much skin as a scrim which barely contained her soul, so available were her emotions. She’s seen above with the author/playwright Carson McCullers and another great actress, Ethel Waters during the run of McCullers’ own adaptation of her novel “The Member of the Wedding”. My stepfather Oliver Rea produced the play, which, while not her first appearance on Broadway, was the first big landmark in Harris’ brilliant career. It was 1950, ten years before I was born, thirteen before the opening of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis which Oliver founded, and seventeen before he ran away with my mother Georgann and we moved to the Dakota. When I began acting in the early eighties I used one of Harris’ character Frankie’s speeches as an audition piece for way too long–I so loved it and her.