Life in the fast Lane
IT’S award season. Greatest hooker, biggest liar, cleanest janitor, lousiest politician, fattest butler — everything’s getting an award. But Monday’s Drama League — born 1916 — gala spotlighted Broadway’s deserving.
Honoree Nathan Lane — who’s hit more stages than Shakespeare: “My first performance was a school play. I was in seventh grade. My Catholic grammar school had no budget for dramas and only did musicals. This was ‘Around the World in 80 Days.’ I had the lead, and it was a divining moment. The first time in my life I remember getting a laugh.
“It was like a drug. That good feeling was totally unexpected. I was getting love from my dysfunctional family and sort of understood this was my vocation. For me, work is not drudgery.
“Not that I don’t appreciate leisure. My partner,
Devlin Elliott, and I have a shelf with books, things, my three Tonys and tchotchkes. We don’t like cooking. Neither of us can. We manage, but he can’t and I don’t so we go out. We have a house in London, where we’ll go Christmas.”
But who remembers a Nathan Lane-less Broadway season? It was just the ’ 80s AIDS epidemic days of “Angels in America.” Coming next, the medieval days of “Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus.” First, who can fit all that on a marquee? Second, it’s bloody, gritty, spoken in iambic pentameter and maybe Nathan schlepping a spear in a tunic.
Meanwhile, his new Tom Ford tux looked to cost more than the whole Roman empire. Host “Producers” mate Matthew Brod
erick’s tux? Who knows? Lane: “This is funny, political, about life and human behavior. Not going out of town. Producer
Scott Rudin, who’s very smart, is opening it here so now it’s called a lab. I don’t know how people will react. We’re figuring it out.” Right. Since all this was above my pay grade, I figured out the only intelligent thing to do. I left him flat and went home.