For those who know her only as Frasier Crane's sarcasm-spewing ex on Cheers, the Tony-/Emmy-winning bundle of Broadway energy should prove a thrilling discovery at Ham Hall Saturday as she performs a program of Kurt Weill/Kander & Ebb tunes.
How did you decide on the concert selections?
I love Kurt Weil's music. Originally, the concerts were going to be all Kurt Weill, then we put him with Kander & Ebb, who were influenced by Kurt Weill. They make sense musically, and in their willingness to tell the truth. That's what I'm really interested in.
There's a lot of great irony in his songs. They're more ironic than dark, and the irony contains both light and dark. People hear Kurt Weill and think, "Oh, Threepenny Opera, it's from Germany, it's dark and it's complicated." But he wrote some beautiful songs, and some are very funny. You know that song Danny Kaye sang, "Tchaikovsky," and he lists all those Russian composers [more than 50 polysyllabic names in 39 seconds]? That's Kurt Weill. He expresses the span of the human experience, which contains everything.
When Cheers ended, were you ever approached to do a Lilith spin-off series?
I'm a pretty smart person, but I can also be astoundingly naive. It's only years later, when I look back at the lunch I was taken to by a network executive at NBC, just before Cheers ended, at the Paramount commissary, when I realized he wanted to talk to me about doing a Lilith spin-off. We talked about doing another TV show, and that was one of the subjects that came up. I think he was very artfully embedding it with ideas for other shows, but I think that was really the point, and I had no idea. It wouldn't have interested me. It's very dangerous to take a character and force it into something else. That said, Frasier is an example of it being done to the most brilliant degree. But when it fails, it's sad. There is something very elegant and graceful about letting something go and leaving it where it is. It was the same thing when Cheers ended.
You're an Honorary Ziegfeld Girl?
YES! The Ziegfeld Society is a philanthropic organization of family and friends of the original Ziegfeld performers. Every year they hold a luncheon and they name an honorary Ziegfeld Girl. I'm very proud of that. I like to think it means that if the Ziegfeld Follies were still going, I'd be in. They even gave me a tiara. I'm a very fortunate girl.
DVDs |
Breakfast on Pluto (R) (4 stars)
$24.96
Almost no one opened their wallets to see this delightfully eccentric picaresque from writer-director Neil Jordan and novelist Patrick McCabe. Blame it on the confluence of films with gay themes—Brokeback Mountain, Transamerica, Rent. American audiences may be willing to put their homophobia aside long enough to check out the media's latest flavor of the month, but only if it doesn't mean a commitment of more than two hours every few months. Breakfast on Pluto tells the story of Patrick "Kitten" Braden—a marvelous star turn from Cillian Murphy—an abandoned orphan, who, early on, surrenders completely to his feminine side. Kitten doesn't much care how his adoptive parents, teachers and classmates respond to his cross-dressing and overt sexuality, and this lack of shame immediately endears him to us. Curiosity about his birth mother puts our high-heeled Candide on a road that winds from a small town in Ireland to post-Beatles London. Along the way, he encounters hippie bikers, IRA terrorists, glam rockers, serial killers, prostitutes, drifters of all sexual persuasions. Jordan mined similar territory in The Crying Game, but the mood here is far more upbeat, and the plot doesn't hinge on a stunning revelation. Breakfast on Pluto is carried by Murphy's brilliant performance.