Sands in 'Kinky Boots.' (© Joan Marcus)

It’s a back-to-work Tuesday, and Stark Sands and Charl Brown are not resting on their Tony nominations. They are anxious to get back into harness.

“You sorta beat your body into shape over the course of the week, then you get a day off—it’s like a reset button,” Mr. Sands told The Observer over his pre-show matzo ball soup at The Edison Café. “You have to start again. It takes a bit longer to warm up.”

Mr. Brown couldn’t agree more: “Once you get into the groove of the week, your body is ready for action every single day. But when coming back on Tuesday, you also have to wake your brain back up.”

Brown as Smokey Robinson in 'Motown.' (© Joan Marcus)

These two have been best buds for more than 15 years. Their paths first crossed at the University of Southern California during Freshman Orientation Week of ’97, and four years later they were playing the palace of Charlemagne in a class of ’01 production of Pippin. During their college years, they got the pal act down pat—both as classmates and as co-stars—so much so, in fact, that they are now Tony-contending (happily, not in the same category) as best friends to the prime movers of their respective musicals.

Mr. Brown is in Motown, speaking and singing in a high-pitched husky haze as Smokey Robinson, first star and chief deputy to Berry Gordy (Brandon Victor Dixon) during the formation of their Detroit vinyl empire. Mr. Sands plays Kinky Boots’ Charlie Price, a straitlaced young shoe manufacturer who, to save the family business, gets his marching orders from a flamboyant drag-diva named Lola (Billy Porter) and executes her aggressively glitzy designs.

Supporting performances don’t come much more supportive than these, but since the lower-keyed Mr. Sands is a solid sounding-board for Mr. Porter’s flashier antics, and since he is (lest we forget) The Boss, his performance has been kicked upstairs to starring-level for Tony consideration, where he now competes with Mr. Porter.

“It’s a wonderful challenge every night,” Mr. Sands confessed. “I couldn’t do it without Billy. At some point, he’ll take a vacation, and I’ll have to, but in my head, I need help. And I know he needs it back. It’s a returned partnership.”

Mr. Brown’s big kick is the terrific one-two punch he gets for merely showing up as Mr. Robinson. “My first entrance on stage gets applause just from hearing his name. In fact, we had to put in a vamp for the audience’s reaction because we’re in music at that point.” Then he opens his mouth, and words roll out in a soft, wind-tunnel type voice that gets greeted with an appreciative, collective gasp from the audience. “No matter how I’m feeling when I walk into that theater, when that happens, I’m there!

On opening night, his favorite review came from Mr. Robinson himself. “He told us he was crying the whole show. It brought back a lot of memories.”

Not lost on Mr. Sands and Mr. Brown is the happy irony that Pippin is in the Tony running the same year they are. Since their college production—Mr. Sands as Pippin and Mr. Brown as his advisor, Leading Player—Pippin has been their show.

“This was something we’d been referring to our entire friendship, so to get a chance to do it was fantastic,” Mr. Brown said. “It was quite a trip. We used a lot of the original choreography, and the staging was very similar to the way we grew up seeing the show, so we really felt like we were a part of the legacy of Pippin. We always dreamed of doing a revival. Now, look: the revival’s here, and we’re not in it!”

The memory was warming for Mr. Sands as well. “I learned a lot doing that show, mostly from our director, Kelly Ward.” Mr. Ward had been one of the T-Birds [Putzie] in 1978 movie Grease, and directed Messrs. Sands and Brown in the stage version of Grease during college. “He told me how to enter and exit a scene. He was strict, but it seems to have worked. I still remember all the things he taught me, and I use them now.”

“Kelly was great,” said Mr. Brown, “teaching us how to be professional actors.”

With USC diplomas in hand, Mr. Sands and Mr. Brown struck out in separate directions but eventually wound up in the same make-or-break town. “We had very different trajectories to get to New York,” said Mr. Sands. “I stayed in Los Angeles and worked in film and TV. I was very lucky to get work in that field, and it took me all over the place—sometimes to New York, but not for plays—till Journey’s End.”

Journey’s End, in 2007, marked his Broadway beginning in a big way. It got him a Theatre World Award for his debut performance and a Tony nomination as a Featured Actor. He played one of those achingly young, idealistic soldiers sacrificed to World War I.

For a snappy change of pace, he journeyed to La Jolla to play Clyde Barrow, Tommy-gun in tow, in Frank Wildhorn’s Bonnie and Clyde. (Riding shotgun for him was this year’s Tony-contending Cinderella, Laura Osnes.) Then he hopped the express back to NYC to take his Broadway musical bow in American Idiot. But, before strapping on that guitar, he slipped in some classics: The Seagull at the McCarter, Twelfth Night opposite Anne Hathaway in the park and The Tempest with Mandy Patinkin at CSC.

Meanwhile, Mr. Brown booked a European tour of Hair after college, playing Hud for two and a half years. “That was 2003 and 2005. When I was coming back and forth from the two, I had a few weeks’ layoff and stayed with Stark at this place in Los Angeles. In 2005, when the tour ended, I moved to New York. He arrived in 2007.”

Both actors remained clear-headed amid all the media-mixing that followed graduation. “When we were studying, we were both studying theater,” Mr. Sands said. “We were theater majors, we had degrees, the focus was theater, so I always started out saying, ‘I want to work as a stage actor. I would love to work in New York on Broadway’—but I was already in L.A., so I thought, since I already knew my way here, I’d see how Hollywood worked out. I didn’t get a huge break, but I was happy working. When I finally got to New York and got Journey’s End, I suddenly became an established, known quantity, largely through that one job.” Recently, he was cast in a film. “When the press release came out, it listed me as ‘Broadway actor.’ I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh! That’s beautiful.’”

On a recent Sunday night off from their shows, the two Pippin veterans took in The Pippin According to Diane Paulus, with its lively, high-wire, circus-y overhaul of the original’s commedia dell’arte trappings. The switch in spectacle captivated both of them. “We loved it,” Mr. Sands said. “I’m such a fan of the show, anyway. From those first opening chords of ‘Magic To Do,’ you just go on a ride.”

He had high praise for Matthew James Thomas, the acrobatic young Brit executing his old role. “I know that Broadway score, and he did it! He has some amazing vocal tricks that put his stamp on those signature songs.”

And Patina Miller, as Leading Player, wowed Mr. Brown, who didn’t flinch at all over the gender-bending magic that director Paulus drew from the role.  She is someone famous for thinking outside the box—it might not be beyond her reach to reverse the role to male, cast these two, and give them their diehard dream.

editorial@observer.com

Ayub Khan Din and Sevan Greene. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

It wasn't designed this way, but suddenly Bunty Berman Presents…—well, Bunty Berman. Since the fifth preview of this loony, tune-y movie spoof, an insert has been stuffed into the show's program announcing in the bluntest boldface possible that "The role of Bunty Berman is being played by Ayub Khan Din"—and not just "at this performance," either. Forever and a day, it would seem.

No mention is made of Erick Avari, the seasoned actor-comedian who was recruited from Los Angeles because a middle-aged Indian man who sings, dances, acts and charismatically holds the show together couldn't be found locally. Mr. Avari logged up the first four performances of Bunty Berman before he tripped while tripping the light fantastic on a sliding staircase. He didn't go down completely—two actors broke his fall—but he did manage to grab onto the railing and yank his bad arm out of place. After consulting a specialist, he opted for the exit and California's soothing sun.

Scott Elliott, artistic director of the New Group and designated driver of this opus, saw more than one man taking a spill; he saw his whole show going down for the count. Panicked, he tore through his mental Rolodex for a plausible—hell, even passable—replacement, lighting on the only possible candidate, who just happened to be sitting right next to him at the time. "You're on, if I can make it happen," he vowed.

Long story short, he made it happen with an S.O.S. to Actors' Equity. "When I called them up, I said, 'I've never called and asked for a favor before, but I want this man in my show,'" Mr. Elliott recalled. "It was pretty apparent that the role was his. They recognized the need, and they obliged."

Thus, on May 9 when Busby Berman Presents... world-premiered at the Acorn Theater in the Theater Row complex off Ninth Avenue, Mr. Din went out there a book writer/lyricist/co-composer but, as Julian March decreed once upon a time, he "must come back a Star." Again, real life trumps and triumphs, kicking Peggy Sawyer's mythic showbiz tale to the curb—the 42nd Street curb, note.

"It's the greatest theatrical irony I ever encountered," Mr. Elliott gleefully crowed about this movie cliche turning real and becoming part of a clever spoof which lines 'em up and knocks 'em down with an almost scholarly relish and regularity that betrays a life well spent in, er, "research."

Indeed, the 50-year-old Mr. Din has been on the case since childhood, growing up Anglo-Indian in London amid too much poverty and reality but never far from a life-adjusting “flick fix” when needed.

The suitable cases for satirizing he assembled for Bunty Berman Presents . . . all hail, he said, "from every single film and play I saw about behind-the-cameras/backstage strife. Everything! I'm not trying to reinvent the goalpost here. I thought, 'This is my first musical, and I'm going to stick within the perimeters of musical theater.' I really tried to do that too. I also tried to make a really strong book. For what I wanted to do here, I needed to have a strong book with strong characters."

To that end, he fashioned his title character—a financially strapped movie mogul in Bombay of 1957—after an actual player in that golden age of Indian cinema, a prolific industry 100 years old.

Bunty Berman, in real life, was Guru Dutt, a producer, director and (if need be) actor. "His output was unique and amazing," declared Mr. Din, a zealous convert. "He tried to change the form of Indian cinema with his lighting and photographic effects. Many of his movies are magnificent in the way he used song-and-dance. It was organic. He's become very well respected in the West now."

Mr. Dutt wore all three hats for his masterpiece, Kaagar Ke Phool, which means Paper Flowers and plays like a distinct echo of the 1954 Judy Garland-James Mason A Star Is Born (i.e., Mr. Dutt is a fading film star who lets a pretty starlet into his heart and then, worse, into his camera frame).

"That picture's kinda the grounding for my whole piece," admitted Mr. Din, who unexpectedly wound up being the star who is born. This may be a little late for Full Disclosure, but the fact is that writing plays (and, now, musicals) wasn't what Mr. Din wanted to do with his life. He first picked the acting profession and trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts—hence, the impressive bearing and the effortlessly booming voice that wear as well on Bunty Berman as his chronic cigar-chomping.

My Beautiful Laundrette marked Mr. Din's movie debut—"I auditioned for the lead but landed a smaller role: the student thrown out of the boarding house by Daniel Day-Lewis"—but he nabbed half of the title roles in his next, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. "After that, I did two more leads—one in an Indian art-house film called Bombay, the other in a Canadian film set in India—then, tons of TV."

During his RADA days, he spent his semester breaks back home, caring for a mother with progressive Alzheimer's. Writing plays was his way of holding on to rapidly evaporating family history. Five years later, his autobiographical East Is East bowed to acclaim at London's National Theater. Its central character was a tyrannical patriarch, as it was in his next, Rafta, Rafta, an Indianized rewrite of Bill Naughton's All in Good Time. Happenstance, perhaps? Not bloody likely: "My father was that kind of figure. He was very dictatorial and ruled the family with an iron hand."

For the first time anywhere, Bunty Berman Presents…, Mr. Din as a lyricist and co-composer—a gene jump-started in his childhood when his mum took him to movie musicals. At director Elliott's suggestion, composer Paul Bogaev extended a steadying, professional hand by translating into music the melodies Mr. Din had in mind with each lyric. "It seemed like the perfect match," reasoned Mr. Elliott. "Paul is a terrific orchestrator, and he really knows how to pull songs into a score." Mr. Din's method of composing is much like Mel Brooks's and Charlie Chaplin's: "I hum things into a microphone until I've got the right melody for the lyrics that I wrote. Mr. Bogaev, somehow, takes it from there.

The proof is in the pudding, and among the more delectable treats is a haunting torch song in which a smitten, bespectacled secretary actually takes off her glasses and sings, "Will He See Me?" And Act One comes to an exuberant end with "Let's Make a Movie," one of those jaunty, jubilant numbers that falls all over itself getting to the finish line. Sometimes, it triggers a clap-along within the audience.

An expert, all-Asian cast executes the above with real wit and style, enlarging our window to the world a little more in the process. It seems a whole new set of them will turn up every time The New Group take on the latest Ayub Khan Din. "Because of our work with him," Mr. Elliott pointed out, returning to crow mode, "The New Group is the Number One employer of Asians in New York's not-for-profit theater." How fitting that that list is now topped by the playwright responsible for all this creative explosion of employment!

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Malloy (far right) with Amelia Workman and Phillipa Soo.

“If you build it—and give them vodka—they will come.”

That appears to be the game plan behind the May 1 grand opening of Kazino, a new theatrical venue at West 13th and Washington Streets in the Meatpacking District. The place comes with a ready-made show—an electropop opera by Dave Malloy, based on “a 70-page sliver” of War and Peace, called Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812—and a design to meet the specific needs of that play.

It’s the same set Mr. Malloy had when the show appeared last fall at the Ars Nova theater in Hell’s Kitchen—the same banquettes and table seating and wraparound bars—but it’s double the size. “It’s a bit more lush and ritzier than what we had before,” Mr. Malloy told The Observer.

Kazino is Russian for casino, but Mr. Malloy hastened to point out, “we don’t actually have any gambling in our show, just lots of vodka.” As at Ars Nova, there are glasses of vodka at every table—and, with Pippin producers Howard and Janet Kagan and Randy Weiner in charge of the transfer, it will likely be of a better grade than the hooch from an Austin, Texas, distillery served before. Indeed, this new club will have a full authentic Russian menu and bar, and the price of a ticket includes dinner and the show. From May 1 to September 1 at Kazino, it will be “Tolstoy Tonight!”

Mr. Malloy, who wrote the libretto, music and lyrics and plays Pierre, traces the show’s beginnings back six years to when he was working on a cruise ship, playing piano. To stay connected while he was at sea, he and his girlfriend, who was on land, read War and Peace together. “We’d be emailing back and forth—things like ‘I’m on page 320. Did you read this part?’ When both of us got to this particular section of the book, we were just completely swept away by it. We could see this poor girl, Natasha, completely ruin herself in the course of a day—and it’s told in parallel with the story of the novel’s other main character, Pierre, who is going through a pretty huge existential crisis of his own.”

The intersection of their stories, to Mr. Malloy, is “the most beautiful, transcendent scene. When Pierre leaves that meeting, that’s when he sees the comet.”

That happens about midway through Tolstoy’s saga, and it takes Mr. Malloy two hours and 10 minutes of through-sung drama to get there.

“In this particular passage, you just see so many characters going through this enormous upheaval in their emotional and spiritual lives. Tolstoy had a very particular style of writing, which is actually something we maintained in the show.”

To maintain that style, the libretto is, wherever possible, word-for-word from the book.

Mr. Malloy didn’t hear melodies in his head at first reading, but said he “sensed that it was inherently the perfect structure for a musical. In a lot of ways, it’s like the traditional structure of a 1950s musical: there’s an A love story and a B love story, and at the end of Act One, everyone’s in jeopardy.”

There are 27 songs in all and no dialogue, so they’re sung through all the way. The music in the production is eclectic, and a particular style of song doesn’t necessarily attach itself to a particular character. “It’s not as calculated as that,” said Mr. Malloy. There’s one exception, however. Whenever Anatole, the young man who seduces Natasha, enters the room, he does so to electronica, bringing a modern touch to a score that is on the whole more traditional and classical. “There are really strong classical and Russian folk elements throughout, but, when Anatole enters, there’s an electronic strain that infects the show and that continues until he leaves.”

As a composer, Mr. Malloy said, he tends to resist genre labels. “I just think of these as songs that borrow from several styles. Some of the songs are in a more traditional pop structure and some are a little more operatic in nature, in that they’re telling dialogue, but even that line gets blurry. There are moments of dialogue that burst into a very melodic chorus. It goes back and forth. There are four or five song—songs that have a very clear beginning and end. They can be taken and sung in a concert.”

Most of the 16-member cast who played the sold-out, six-week gig at Ars Nova will be reprising their roles downtown. In addition to Mr. Malloy’s Pierre, there are Lucas Steele’s sensual Anatole, Amber Gray’s comedic Helene and Phillipa Soo’s tragic Natasha. In her New York debut fresh out of Juilliard, Ms. Soo got nominated for a Drama League Distinguished Performance Award for her work in the show. The musical earned Mr. Malloy the 2013 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater.

He isn’t above outfitting his show with his close musical friends. He’s known Brittain Ashford, who has the “Sonya Alone” song at the beginning of Act Two, for around five years. “That particular song was actually written for her,” he said, “because I know her voice so well.”

Mr. Malloy studied music composition in college. He backed into theater in San Francisco 13 years ago. “I was playing in some bands and working at a record store. One of my co-workers there called me up and said, ‘Hey, I hear you play keyboard. I’m doing a play and need a keyboard player. Do you want to be in this?’ I went, ‘Sure, sounds like fun.’ It was, and I met more people who wanted me to do their shows.”

Gradually, he worked his way up to writing. “First I was playing piano, then I was music-directing, then I was sound-designing, then I was composing. In just about four or five years, I was writing full-scale musicals.”

The sandy-headed 37-year-old has written seven full-length musicals to date, among them Three Pianos, a drunken romp through Schubert’s “Winterreise,” which premiered at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater at St. Marks Church in 2010 and later had sold-out runs at New York Theater Workshop and American Repertory Theater in Cambridge.

“Three Pianos was based on a song cycle about a man who gets his heart broken and just goes wandering in a winter wasteland for 24 songs. We sang our way through that song cycle while enacting Schubert and his friends and throwing a Schubertiade at these parties that Schubert used to throw, so we served red wine to the audience.”

Vis-à-vis that vodka at Kazino, it may be that a Malloy song just goes better with booze. “I’m a big fan of that,” he said. A previous show of his, Beowulf, went from the Shotgun, a theater in Berkeley, Calif., to the Abrons Arts Center in New York, but in touring the show, he found that the rock club setting, in which people had beers in hand and were “hooting and hollering,” just worked better. “There’s an old quote from Bertolt Brecht, who said, ‘Theater without beer is a museum,’ which I strongly believe in. When you go to the theater, you should have a festive, joyful time, and I feel alcohol can open that up.”

As for War and Peace, there may yet be a sequel, if Mr. Malloy’s conversations with his director, Rachel Chavkin, go from levity to reality. “We have jokes about how we’ll make this our lives’ work and we’ll just keep doing little pieces of it until we have a 40-hour epic,” he said. “This is very much a Peace section of the book. If we did another section, it would definitely be a War section. We’ve thought about doing it out on Governor’s Island—y’know, we would do a big outdoor show of the battle with a 40-piece brass orchestra and cannons and everything.”

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Diane Paulus at a 'Pippin' rehearsal. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Seeking her next show, Boston-based director Diane Paulus, who has been making a name for herself reimagining classic American musicals, ran through her mental catalog of the musicals she loved. After she did her revival of Hair in 2011, she said, “Pippin was always at the top of the list.” It went on the back burner for a few years while she directed The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, which ended its Broadway run in 2012. “It gave me time to think about the physical production I wanted for Pippin,” she said. “I knew a revival would really need to have a physical vocabulary that touched the Fosse style but then also took it to a new place.” That new place, as audiences will discover when the show opens on April 25 at the Music Box Theatre, is the circus.

Roger O. Hirson’s 1972 book had Pippin, Charlemagne’s firstborn, fall in with a traveling troupe of actors. It was, Ms. Paulus pointed out, “rooted in commedia dell’arte style and, of course, Bob Fosse’s signature dance style, which defined that production. But I said, ‘Who are these players? Who is this troupe that mysteriously comes to town, sets up shop and seduces Pippin—and the audience—into taking this journey of self-discovery?’”

That thinking led her to the idea of a traveling circus. In the meantime, she had been trying to work out a project to do with Les 7 doigts de la main, an acrobatic troupe in Montreal. “When I finally connected the dots between them and Pippin and Fosse, the lightbulb went off.”

The toughest part of the production, she said, was combining the Fosse moves with the acrobatics—but it’s also been the most rewarding. “It’s such detailed, physical work, and both have to be meticulous. Acrobats are jumping and flipping and landing inches away from dancers. To make them feel integrated was the real trick, but now that we’ve kinda cracked it and found the way to blend too, it is, for me, a genuine joy.”

Pushing the Pippin envelope even further, Ms. Paulus cast a woman as Leading Player, the part that Ben Vereen took for a star-making, Tony-winning spin in 1973. She had asked the show’s composer, Stephen Schwartz, who this character was. “Anybody different from Pippin,” she remembers him telling her. “The Leading Player is meant to represent The Other—the other thing that Pippin has never experienced.”

So she cast Patina Miller, who was fresh out of her nun’s habit from Sister Act. Only later did she learn that Ms. Miller has a gymnast past, which proved helpful.

Even so, Ms. Miller, who is on a trapeze for part of the show, had to deal with her vertigo. “I’m thinking to myself,” she told The Observer, “‘They don’t know I’m scared of heights. I’ll fake my way through.’ And I did.”

Heights are no problem for the show’s Pippin, however. Matthew James Thomas logged flying time as an alternate Peter Parker in Spider-Man. “I can move and dance, but I wouldn’t call myself an acrobat,” he said. “Not like these guys. But I do like physical shows and I do like doing the daring stunts.”

Berthe, Pippin’s raunchy grandma, was a tough role to fill. In 1972, it was the final role of Irene Ryan (Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies)—and a great one to ride out on, complete with the show-stopping “No Time at All.” (If memory serves, she came “down in one” for her big scene, delivered the goods and left to rapturous applause and a Tony nomination.)

Andrea Martin, as usual, comes on like Andrea-concentrate as Berthe, filling a small role with maximum effect. “I think every good actor does that,” she reasoned. “I can’t not do that. I can’t not commit 100 percent, no matter what it is. I guess it’s just my nature.” She does her big number airborne, twirling like a baton.

“I like that it brings a different perspective to the show,” she said of her role. “This is an older person talking about seizing the day and trying to impart wisdom to a younger person. I have two sons—29 and 31—and I know what it’s like to try to share my life experiences and maybe not have them listen. Or listen. Two different generations—and they’re the ones with the longer life. She’s able to look at this boy and know the mistakes he’s going to make, and hopefully guide him around them.”

Pippin’s father and stepmother, Charlemagne and Fastrada, are played by real-life marrieds Terrence Mann and Charlotte d’Amboise. They met as Cats and rarely get a chance to reteam. “It’s a little difficult, because we have two children,” Ms. d’Amboise said, “but Pippin has been nice for us artistically, and it has been nice for our relationship.”

As a recurring Roxie Hart in the longest-running American musical on Broadway, Chicago, she knows her Fosse and gets to prove it with “Spread a Little Sunshine.”

One thing the cast seems to agree on is the energy Diane Paulus brings to the production. Mr. Mann, a former Javert now with flowing white hair, has nothing but praise for the way she put the show together at Boston’s American Repertory Theatre, where she is artistic director. “She’s just the smartest person in the room,” he said.

“Not only can she tell you how to do it, she can do it herself. She can sing, she can dance, she can act. And she’s tireless. She knows every aspect about what’s going on with the show. Her instincts about what’s right and what’s wrong in a scene, you just trust. And everybody feels that way. It’s extraordinary when you can be in a room with somebody that you just trust and you let them take you on the journey.”

That’s seconded by Rachel Bay Jones, a comedienne in the Carol Kane mold who plays Pippin’s love interest, Catherine, a widow with a child who is his way to The Simple Life. “Diane is enormously creative and free and open,” she said. “She creates shows where actors are really given breadth to grow and give rich performances.”

Chet Walker, 58, was a teenager—at the time, the youngest dancer on Broadway—40 years ago when he played a peasant in the original production of Pippin. Now he has been tapped to create choreography “in the style of Bob Fosse,” much as Ann Reinking did for Chicago. He didn’t change a step of the “Manson trio” number, a signature Fosse piece that showed up in the middle of the “Glory” number and was extracted for a now-famous TV ad—the first time the medium promoted a Broadway show.

Mr. Schwartz’s theatrical-pop score now sports new orchestrations by Larry Hochman. “In some cases,” added music director Charlie Alterman, “we’ve done new arrangements, particularly in relation to the acrobatics. Because of this whole circus concept, we’ve given a little circus flair to the sound of the music. I would say other elements of the score really harked to the essence of the original. Even without making an active attempt to update the sound of the show, just the sensibility of it being orchestrated in 2013 and played by musicians in 2013 gives it a different feel.”

Like Mr. Hirson, Mr. Schwartz has hovered on the sidelines while the show he helped create is being reinvented. To date, there have been no complaints. In fact, said Mr. Alterman, “Stephen’s been incredibly supportive. He’s not shy about saying what he feels, but he always has great things to say. He also puts a lot of trust in people, and he’s really interested to see what we’re going to bring to the table.”

Trust appears to be the operative word for Pippin. It has special gravity for Philip Rosenberg, one of the seven acrobats executing phenomenal high-flying feats throughout the show. “I never did anything in the musical-theater realm at all,” the 26-year-old said. “It was always circus and acrobatic, so this is all new to me.”

Not all stunts come off smoothly, Mr. Rosenberg allowed, but that goes with the sawdust turf. “Sometimes it messes up, but that’s the beauty of the circus. You get another try at it. There’s a rule of three in circus: you get three tries, and the more times you mess up, the more the audience will clap when you make it. It builds the pressure.”

editorial@observer.com

Billy Porter in 'Kinky Boots.'

Chances are excellent—even without the Las Vegas odds-makers weighing in on the subject—that you won’t recognize the gentleman who, on June 9, steps onto the stage of Radio City Music Hall and collects his Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical.

As the Broadway season enters its homestretch, two front-runners are emerging in this category. One works under the name of Lola, the other as Miss Trunchbull. They come from opposite ends of the runway—Lola in sparkly, 2½-foot-high red leather boots, Miss Trunchbull in a drab, green, severely tailored pantsuit.

That’s right, this particular Tony contest is shaping up as a drag race.

In this corner, representing the stars and stripes (with extra sparkle on the red stripes), is Billy Porter, 43, of Pittsburgh, Pa., schooled at Carnegie Mellon and best known on Broadway for originating the high-octave “Teen Angel” in the 1984 revival of Grease. In Kinky Boots, he plays a drag club singer who revitalizes a failing Northampton shoe factory by switching its output from sensible men’s shoes to ridiculously over-the-top boots that are made for flaunting. Guess what? Sex sells.

In the other corner, wearing Union Jack trunks, is Bertie Carvel, 35, the genuine British article, schooled at Sussex and RADA, best known for hassling Anne Hathaway into whoredom in Les Misérables. In Matilda, he is reprising his Olivier Award-winning performance of the hard-nosed headmistress of Crunchen Hall Primary School, a cackling crone of the Miss Gulch-Miss Hannigan school of comic villainy.

“Harvey Fierstein is an idol of mine, and I don’t have many, because I didn’t grow up with that,” Mr. Porter told The Observer. “But I don’t think there’s anybody else on this planet who could, should and did write a role I could step into like this. In fact, I even did a monologue from Torch Song Trilogy to get into college.”

It’s true. Mr. Fierstein is the go-to guy for diva fittings and alterations, as he should be: he won two of his Tonys in dresses (Torch Song Trilogy and Hairspray), and he incubated two more by writing La Cage aux Folles. Its lead character, Albin, entertains in drag at a St-Tropez nightclub, and it’s a part that has won Tonys two out of the three times it was on Broadway—for George Hearn in 1983 and for Douglas Hodge in 2010. The one Tony-winning transvestite with no Fierstein ties at all is Wilson Jermaine Heredia, the doomed Angel of Rent.

For Lola, Mr. Porter pulls out all the stops, prancing out this intimidating, undulating force of nature. How does it feel parading around the stage in those long-stemmed hot-red boots? “Empowering!” Mr. Porter shot back. “They’re sexy. I feel like I can take over the world.” And he plays it accordingly. When he shifts to “civilian” attire, he has mastered a cool, convincing slink in heels ranging from four inches to seven. “It feels funny to walk in flats now.”

Costume designer Gregg Barnes, who gussied up The Drowsy Chaperone and Follies to Tony-winning effect, lays on the beads and sequins, keeping Mr. Porter in a fairly constant glamorous whirl—all to the lively tunes of Cyndi Lauper and the athletic choreography of director Jerry Mitchell.

When Mr. Porter flies off stage, it’s always into the waiting arms of his personal dresser—“and a couple of times, another dresser assists,” he said. “It looks out front a lot more difficult than it is. But it’s not easy, either. It’s the magic of the theater.”

Quick changes aside, there is nothing challenging for him about playing Lola. “Nothing. I’ve lived it. I’ve been an outsider. I’ve been an outcast. I’m an African-American gay Christian man living in America. I know what that feels like.

“Sometimes there are audiences who have a difficult time with Lola at the top of the show. You can tell they’re uncomfortable. They’re shifting and crinkling programs. Of course, that softens as the show goes on. Once I do this song, ‘I’m Not My Father’s Son,’ about disappointing my father, they know they can’t write Lola off anymore.

“With this show—the music, the subject material—it was very important to me—and Jerry as well—that Lola looked like she could be in a magazine today, like a woman walking down the street today. I crafted the role around authenticity and realness—feminine realism.”

GAYNESS IS NOT, OF COURSE, a prerequisite to play a transvestite. Mr. Porter points to The Nance, about to open a block away. It takes place in the LaGuardia-era New York of the late ’30s, when straight men still did drag or minced about the vaudeville stage as gays.

Enter Bertie Carvel, younger and much better-looking than the harridan-in-heat he plays in Matilda. His gender agenda is the polar opposite of Mr. Porter’s. He would be satisfied if the audience couldn’t figure out whether Miss Trunchbull is played by a man or a woman. “I’m not bothered either way,” he shrugged. “I take it as a compliment when people can’t believe that it was me playing the part, but I’m not trying to disguise anything. I’ve never thought that it was especially funny that a man was playing a woman. That’s not the gag. If that’s the gag—if that’s what people find funny—then we’re kinda lost.”

Mr. Carvel was replaced in the London production by a man, for whatever that’s worth—but he could envision the role being played by a woman as well. “To be honest,” Mr. Carvel said of the role, “it’s hugely enjoyable. I really enjoy transforming. Any role you play as an actor is a transformation. ”

He grew up the only child of a journalist father and psychiatrist mother, and the basics of these professions—the fact-finding and the analyzing—have proved helpful qualities for a serious actor to have inherited.

Both came to bear in putting together that tightly wound minefield of tics and twitches, Miss Trunchbull. “Most of it comes from the text, really,” he said, referring to Dennis Kelly’s book and Tim Minchin’s songs, both based on Roald Dahl’s 1988 children’s novel.

“One’s job as an actor, really, was to pay attention to those signposts and let your imagination work on it.” After his imagination had been percolating a spell, he met briefly with the man who had hired him for the assignment, director Matthew Warchus. “It became clear we were thinking in a similar direction. Then I went away and let my imagination play.” Led by logic, he physicalized his characterization from the facts: the character was the Olympic hammer-throwing champion of 1969. And hammer throwers have huge trapezius muscles. “If you build up the trapezius,” he discovered, “it creates the impression you have almost no neck.”

In fact, the sport beefed up her whole upper body. “I want her chest to enter the room before anything else,” Mr. Carvel said, and to this end Phil Reynolds of the Batman films created a special breastplate that does the trick. Miss Trunchbull is all-torso on spindly legs, moving about the stage as if motorized in uncertain, ungainly spurts and lunges, much like Charles Laughton’s hunchback.

The lady is not without delicate touches, however. There is that hand she keeps in the air at all times, a quivering claw that suggests an encounter with nerve gas in the war trenches. She moves with surprising speed and daintiness.

“They call the hammer throw the ballet of the big man,” Mr. Carvel pointed out. “It is kinda counter-balletic, this incongruous mix of delicate grace and great physical bulk. Hammer throwers turn on a dime, because, in order to throw this object a hundred meters, you have to create a huge amount of centrifugal force. You have to turn your body on a very small area—this is the balletic step the hammer throw is based on.”

Decades past her Olympic prime, Miss Trunchbull has been reduced to lording over, and terrorizing, little schoolgirls. “To some extent, her once-powerful athlete’s physique has shifted somewhat, twisted by age and bitterness.”

Costume and wig do much of the transforming work here. While Mr. Porter is having extra glitter applied to his lip-gloss, Mr. Carvel is giving himself smoker’s teeth, painting on brown enamel. “Whatever switches clicked in one’s head while working out how it should feel to be Miss Trunchbull, I feel completely supported by looking in the mirror before I go on and going, ‘Yes, that’s who I saw in my mind’s eye.’”

Mr. Carvel tends to downplay how little time he spends on stage. “I haven’t really measured it, but my girlfriend said at one point, ‘You’re barely in this,’ implying ‘How are you getting away with all this acclaim?’ It’s true,” he said. “Everybody else does all the hard work.”

It’s not true. The show turns 48-karat gold when he hits the stage.

Miss Trunchbull’s reputation precedes Mr. Carvel’s arrival, the stage darkening at the first mention of her name. “It’s a great gift to be the dreaded arrival—an old trick, really—building a character up for 16 pages before he arrives,” he said.

It certainly worked dark wonders for the Phantom of the Opera, which has the dubious distinction of being the shortest role, in terms of stage time, ever to receive the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Musical. Miss Trunchbull now rivals that record. When clocked recently on the same night, both performances came in at 41 minutes,

editorial@observer.com

Amanda Green. (Courtesy Durrell Godfrey)

To see Amanda Green at Birdland or at 54 Below is to see two theatrical worlds melding in happy harmony. She is the offspring of Tony winners—actress Phyllis   Newman and lyricist Adolph Green—and the apple hasn’t fallen far from the tree.

“It seems like a straight line,” Ms. Green allowed, “but actually it was a very squiggly line that got me to where I am today.” Where she is on this particular Wednesday is the Café Edison, where a few doors down on West 47^th she is about to open her second Broadway show of the 2012-2013 season, Hands on a Hardbody.

The curtain has just come down on the final “unfrozen” matinee of this musical she has written with Phish’s Trey Anastasio and Pulitzer Prize-winning Doug Wright. The tweaking and tightening will come to a complete stop in a couple of days, and they’ll go with what they got, for richer or for poorer, March 21 at the Brooks Atkinson.

Its provocative title refers to an endurance contest held annually by an auto-dealership in Longview, TX. The hardbody is a spiffy new Frontier Nissan pick-up truck, which goes to the lucky soul whose hand stays on its blistering chrome the longest. It’s a blue-collar, stand-up-and-be-counted version of the Depression-vintage marathon-dancing previously shown in musicals like Steel Pier and movies like Hard to Handle and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

S. R. Bindler, a hometown boy on a break from NYU film school, came upon this phenomenon at three a.m. one September morning in 1992 when he stepped out of the bar he had just closed and into the florescent glow of a used-car lot across the street.

To him, it looked like a camp meeting of The Walking Dead, shuffling in circles around a truck, gliding gloved hands along a gleaming surface. There were five-minute breaks every hour and 15-minute breaks every six hours.  If the heat didn’t get you, the hallucinations would. The last person standing emerged after 70 hours.

A year later Mr. Bindler returned to Longview with a camera and a producer (Kevin Morris) to film this rustic ritual. The result, teasingly titled Hands on a Hardbody, won documentary honors in Los Angeles, Boston and Orlando in 1997 and national distribution in 1998. Robert Altman was planning to reprise it as a feature film at the time of his death. It also crossed Mr. Wright’s line of vision. His claim to fame—after his Tony and Pulitzer for I Am My Own Wife—is he saw a big Broadway musical in Grey Gardens, the Maysles brothers’ 1975 documentary on Jackie Onassis’ white-trash kin, the Beale belles of East Hampton, and he saw it in down-and-out Texans struggling to stay standing three straight days for a free truck.

“On the surface of it, it seems absurd,” Ms. Green said. “All these people standing around in the hot sun with their hand on a truck. You think you’re going to giggle, but, by the end, you care deeply about each person and understand how important it is for them to get that truck.”

Then there is the elephant in the room--the Nissan on the stage—with the threat of theater stagnation forming around it. “We kinda liked the challenge of that,” Ms. Green said. “We never felt in our bones the show would be static or stationary because we knew how much drama was in it and what the stakes were. It’s a profound metaphor—the American dream, survival of the fittest—how desperately people need that truck, given the state of today’s middle class.”

For stage purposes, the field has been trimmed to nine from the 24 who originally showed up for the film documentary. “We created tension between the car dealers. We created marital discord and romances where none were. We felt free to make a drama out of it, a story you would want to watch.”

Longview is light years removed from Ms. Green’s milieu—and, as a lyricist, she likes it like that.  “I think that’s your job as a writer, to immerse yourself in a world.”

Thus, it’s no accident the songs that begin and end the first act—“Human Drama Kind of Thing” and “Hunt with the Big Dogs”—are words right out of the film-documented mouth of the real Benny Perkins. Played by Hunter Foster in the musical, Mr. Perkins won the Nissan the year before and has come back for seconds.

Ms. Green took a road trip to Texas with Mr. Wright. “We went to Dallas where Doug is from, saw the Texas State Fair, had some deep-fried Oreos and drove to Longview where we met the people in the movie.”

Locating them was one of two hurdles that stalled the production. Finally, her husband—Jeffrey Kaplan, an orthopedic surgeon by trade—suggested she use a private detective. He also filled in the other major blank of the musical—the composer—by recommending Mr. Anastasio. Until the Phish frontman took over, Ms. Green was writing both words and music; her proudest effort, she said, was a haunting, sweetly affecting paean to times past, “Used to Be.”

Her own personal “Used to Be” is where we go into Technicolor. She grew up way out West—Central Park West—in a sprawling duplex. Her dad—with Betty Comden—wrote that metropolitan mantra, “New York, New York, a helluvah town.”

Comden-&-Green was the longest-running collaboration in show business history—stretching from January 1941 when they joined Alvin Hammer and Judy Tuvim (later Holliday) on stage at the Village Vanguard as The Revuers, to the day before Mr. Green’s demise in October 2002. Together, they amassed seven Tonys—from Wonderful Town to The Will Rogers Follies—and wrote such classic landmark M-G-M musicals as Singin’ in the Rain and On the Town.

Growing up Green “was everything you’d think it would be: thrilling! My parents were friends of all the incredible people on Broadway—Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Jule Styne, Cy Coleman. Isaac Stern lived next door, and his kids were my great friends. There were great parties, with all those people playing the piano and singing. Sometimes, they’d trot me out to sing at those parties, which I loved.”

She made her stage debut in two of those friends’ West Side Story, playing Maria. “I was nine. I like to think that wasn’t the apex of my career, but you never know.”

Ms. Green found cabaret a perfect place to exercise her twin talents—performing, usually her own material.

“My father came to see me perform a lot, y’know, cabaret evenings like Put a Little Love in Your Mouth! (which is a song sung by a dentist, by the way). He was very proud of me and my songwriting. I would run lyrics by him. He wasn’t very judgmental because he was a very kind person, but, if I made him laugh, that was a strike. I recall once, I played him something I wrote, and I said, ‘Well, it’s really not that great,’ and he was, like, ‘No, it’s not.’ I said, ‘You’re not supposed to tell me the truth.’’’

After his death, Ms. Comden took up the mentoring. “She was like an aunt to me. She was so encouraging and very loyal.”

One thing that ties Ms. Green’s past and present up in a nice neat bow is Keith Carradine, who stars in Hands on a Hard Body and starred in the last Comden-&-Green, The Will Rogers Follies. “I had a crush on Keith as a young child,” she admitted. “I saw him in Nashville and fell in love with him. Then, he was in The Will Rogers Follies—and fantastic in it. Actually, when I wrote the song ‘Used to Be,’ I wrote it with him in mind..

“Keith and I have a great sense of continuity and history. He’d given my dad an opening-night gift for The Will Rogers Follies—a framed picture of Will Rogers, and it said, ‘To Adolph, Love Keith.’ And I had a plaque put over it, and I said, ‘To Keith, Love Amanda,’ with the date on it for our opening night in La Jolla. He cried.”

This is her third try at Mount Broadway, her first without composer Tom Kitt. High Fidelity in 2006 went silent after 13 performances, but Bring It On: The Musical  fared much better with 171 performances during the first half of this season.

Five years are the typical gestation period for Broadway musicals these days. High Fidelity, from page to stage, took that long—but its melodies and lyrics have their own mysterious ways of lingering on. In May, Ms. Green and Mr. Kitt will perform a concert of the entire now-cultish score of High Fidelity at 54 Below.

Hands on a Hardbody, likewise, tips the scales at half a decade of hard work, but “it’s grown a lot,” Ms. Green noted. “We’ve done workshops, developmental workshops, a production, a workshop after the production. I see the value in all that because each time you do it, you learn something new. It doesn’t matter how much you think you know it. Doing a production in La Jolla and then leaving it two months—we looked back and said, ‘Why did we put that song second? My God! What were we thinking? It stops the action completely.’ So, you don’t have that clarity of thought.”

A week before we spoke, she and her colleagues wrote a song in the dressing room. “Like an old showbiz story,” she said. It just happened. I found a segment of a lyric that I’d discarded five years before, and I set it. Trey had his guitar, and I started singing, and there you go. We put it in the show two days later. Very Mickey and Judy.”

EmiliaClarke. Photograph by Jason Bell.

In the Carlyle Hotel’s Royal Suite, Tiffany’s iconic crack-of-dawn window-shopper was having her theatrical coming-out party. We’re talkin’ Broadway here—the belated stage bow of Breakfast at Tiffany’s—and Sean Mathias, the British director who’ll bring it to pass March 20 at the Cort, was holding forth.

“This will be like seeing a new play,” he promised a group of journalists. “That is the excitement of this.”

It’s not a musical, though it has musical elements. “Holly Golightly sings a song—just not ‘Moon River,’” he said. “It’s a surprise what she sings. It’s not Audrey Hepburn. It’s not George Peppard. It’s not Blake Edwards. It is Truman Capote, by way of Richard Greenberg.”

Mr. Greenberg, a no-show with three shows about to open, was presumably deep in rewrites in some urban cave somewhere. But Mr. Mathias proved more than an able spokesman for Breakfast at Tiffany’s, having helmed another version of it at London’s Haymarket in 2009, starring Anna Friel of Broadway’s Closer and Joseph Cross of Lincoln, Milk and Running With Scissors.

“I’ve had the title in my pocket now for five years so I have a real relationship with this property,” he declared. “Samuel Adamson, an Australian who lives in London, wrote that one. The Greenberg one is quite different: it’s the New York version.”

The Golightly According to Greenberg, he said, “was instigated by producer Colin Ingram—actually, it was his wife’s idea—so here we are.” For stars, he hired two precisely cast Broadway novices and surrounded them with 13 fairly familiar stage faces.

Holly is Emilia Clarke, currently lording over HBO’s medieval fantasy, Game of Thrones, and the Capone-facsimile sideline-observer (here called Fred) is Cory Michael Smith, the Mormon house-caller of The Whale at Playwrights Horizons.

A gangling youth along the jagged lines of early Anthony Perkins, Mr. Smith said he was shooting for a Capote-Peppard blend in his role. “I like to think Fred is an amalgam of both—a leading man like George and an artist like Truman. He has had an abandoned, neglected childhood so he’s a similarly damaged individual, coming to New York young, running away from something.”

Fred and Holly come together like orphans of the storm. A relationship, and some love, ensue—but it’s hardly as romanticized as the movie. “It’s so daring to try to tell this story and do it on stage.” Mr. Smith ventured. “I appreciate the courageousness of it because I think the play is very much in the spirit of Truman and Holly. It’s a tragic story in a way, but it certainly has elements of comedy. Truman loved big characters, and those are the ones who bring levity to the story. I would like to think that it’s as complex a play as Holly is a character.”

Ms. Clarke said, “The play’s more dramatic than the film was. There’s more heartbreak and soul to it here. I’m Holly Goheavily.”

How really different, Mr. Mathias was asked, are his Hollys? “Every actor is unique,” he tactfully noted, “and what Emilia brings to it more than anything is youth, freshness—I mean, she’s totally charming, incredibly talented, all those things.”

He had seen her at work tending dragons and such on HBO before a casting director suggested she’d have enough crust to request “$50 for the power room” as Holly did on dates. “I thought [Game of Thrones] was very striking, and she was rather wonderful, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a good audition for Holly, so they sent her to me, she auditioned, and I just loved her.”

On Thrones, Ms. Clarke’s character, Dany, is “an exiled princess who turns into a warrior queen—in a sentence,” she said with a giggle. This somehow seems to put her on an equal footing with Holly Golightly in the concrete jungle of Gotham. “What they do have in common is they’re both, fundamentally, survivors.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s marks Ms. Clarke’s stage debut—although she asterisked, “I trained at Drama School for three years. That was the last time I did a proper play.” Stepping from Dany to Holly has been head-swimming. “As in a fairy tale, it just sorta happened. I got the call. I got incredibly excited. I met Sean. We had a very decadent four-hour lunch, followed by an audition the next day, which was wonderful, but the day after the audition, I told a friend, ‘I feel like Wendy, and he’s gone back to Never Never Land.’”

Now, Ms. Clarke must face down the Grendel’s Mother of movie memory. “Audrey Hepburn is Audrey Hepburn, and she is untouchable, isn’t she?” said Mr. Mathias, assessing the battlefield.

“We never refer to the movie,” he said. “Never. I’ve never even discussed it with Emilia. I’ve never even asked her if she’s seen the movie because it would not be helpful. We are concentrating purely on the book.”

Returning to the roots of Holly Golightly is like returning to the roots of Cinderella, as we’ve already seen this season. The public is reluctant to buy it because they have already bought the movie version, and they cling to it.

Mr. Capote acknowledged that the immediate mythology of the movie pretty much covered the trail back to his novella and to the Holly Golightly of his own creation. (That character was supposedly inspired by the personality of Carol Grace, an actress-author who was whispered to be the illegitimate offspring of Leslie Howard and who subsequently wed William Saroyan and Walter Matthau.) “The screenplay of Breakfast at Tiffany’s seems to me excellent,” assessed Mr. Capote at the time, “but more as a creation of its own than an adaptation of my book—no complaints, however ... and, anyhow, Holly is still Holly, except once or twice.”

Audrey Hepburn entered the film aware that she was miscast in a part fashioned for Marilyn Monroe. Never mind that Holly is 19 in the book and she was 31. Also, never mind her English affectations disguised a Texas accent. Having long ago said adieu to realism, Hubert Givenchy was allowed to give new meaning to the phrase “high-end hooker”; in fact, the black frock he whipped up for her entrance in the opening credits is the second most expensive piece of movie memorabilia ever sold at Christie’s London Auction House.

The truest note in the film was struck by Henry Mancini’s sad, surging “Moon River,” which caught the melancholy of the Capote book. Musically, he was merely playing it close to the vest, using only one octave and sculpting the song to Hepburn’s untrained voice.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s may not be Hepburn’s personal-best performance, but it’s the one you want to take to the desert island. The Capote roots got upstaged, lost in all that starry screen stuff, and there have been a few theatrical expeditions to unearth these treasures. Infamously, producer David Merrick tried to bring a stage version to Broadway in 1966 with Mary Tyler Moore, Richard Chamberlain and a Bob Merrill score, and some major scribes tried to break the Capote code—to name names: Nunnally Johnson, Abe Burrows and Edward Albee. The latter killed “Cat,” and Mr. Merrick killed the show after Preview Four—a big million-dollar misunderstanding.

With this new Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Mr. Mathias finally gives Mr. Capote his day in court and lets him make his own music. He reminded the press: “Holly Golightly, at the end of the story, says of New York—the city in which she lives and loves—‘this town is dead to me. Certain shades of limelight wreck a girl’s complexion’—and, of course, that’s exactly what happened to Truman Capote himself many years later. Certain shades of limelight wrecked his complexion.

“We’re not here to restore Truman Capote to you. ... We are here to share our version of this story with you—and one that we think is very touching, very compassionate, full of style and glamour and wit.”

Judith Light, beloved. (John Lamparski/WireImage)

It was not the sort of applause that generally greets a star. It was that more rarefied kind reserved for somebody truly beloved. Last December, when Judith Light took to the stage of the New Amsterdam at The 24th Annual Gypsy of the Year competition to do what has become her regular moment-of-silence spot for those lost to AIDS, there was a massive outpouring of affection. A longtime Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS standard-bearer, she couldn’t be better cast for the bit, her voice ringing with dignity and compassion. But that reception set off in me a wave of jealousy, along with the toxic thought, “Damn! They love her as much as I do!”

Bernie Telsey, the casting director and co-founder of Manhattan Class Company, understands my petty feeling well—he doesn’t enjoy sharing Ms. Light either. On the one hand, as he counseled me last week, you’re happy that people see what you see. On the other hand, “she’s not your secret anymore.”

Mr. Telsey, who had almost everything to do with

getting Ms. Light back on the Broadway track, having hired her in 1999 to replace the awesome, award-showered Kathleen Chalfant in Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Wit, has cast Ms. Light as the honoree—“for her bold, daring, risk-taking spirit”—at MCC’s annual fund-raising gala, “Miscast 2013,” which will be held March 4 at the Hammerstein Ballroom.

She’s had three shows on the Main Stem in three seasons—pretty good hittin’ in anybody’s book, and worth celebrating—and she was a shoo-in, Mr. Telsey said, when he and his MCC partners, Robert LuPone, Will Cantler and Blake West, threw the bones on the floor. “When we talked of someone who’s touched our lives as an actress, as an ambassador for our arts and education program, it was unanimous. All four of us have that kind of relationship with her.”

Since Wit, he pointed out, she hasn’t stopped working in New York. “She’s so connected with the words that she’s saying, in whatever play, that she touches you as an audience member. When she speaks, it crosses over those footlights and lands in your lap. She’s sharing that character’s story, and you just feel connected with her.”

This season, Ms. Light will appear in Richard Greenberg’s The Assembled Parties, bowing April 17 at the Samuel J. Friedman under Lynne Meadow’s direction. In the contemporary domestic battle station of a sprawling Central Park West apartment on the Upper West Side, she fights a 20 years’ war with her ex-movie-star in-law (Jessica Hecht).

But Ms. Light’s second life on Broadway, beginning with Wit, wasn’t exactly something she expected. “When you do something else for a long time, people don’t know what you can do,” she said in a recent interview. “The story has been that they say, ‘Well, we thought she was One Life to Live or Who’s the Boss?’ and then, all of a sudden, who would think they would put me into Wit?”

THE TRENTON-BORN MS. LIGHT came out of Carnegie Mellon “a terrible theater snob” (her own words, in hindsight) who toiled in the regional vineyards and at Milwaukee Rep and Seattle Rep. In 1975, on a rare foray to New York for a Theatre Communications Group audition, she met casting director Rosemary Tichenor and asked from point-blank range if she seemed Broadway-ready.

“Not unless you’re planning to make your life in rep,” replied the wise Ms. Tichenor, who was then staffing A Doll’s House and assigned her to maid service for Liv Ullmann. The legend and the novice made their Broadway bows together; currently, Ms. Ullmann is plotting another go at A Doll’s House, directing her own adaptation.

Sans Ms. Tichenor, Broadway was harder and harsher for Ms. Light. It was an uphill climb convincing her then-agent to send her out for Herzl. She realized from a Backstage character breakdown of the wife of the Zionism founder that she was that woman, and that she deserved to be seen. She was, and she got it.

All eight performances of Herzl brought Ms. Light’s lifetime Broadway total up to 116, so she looked Off Broadway for work, tried a little Richard III and As You Like It, decided she didn’t (like it) and focused uptown on the green pastures of daytime soap opera. She settled into One Life to Live for five high-profile years as Mrs. Karen Wolek and proceeded to lead one of the liveliest double lives in “Llanview.”

One day, her head writer asked if she had ever seen Luis Buñuel’s artsy, sexy movie about a housewife-turned-hooker called Belle de Jour. “We’re thinking of doing that character with your story line—what do you think?” he said. She gamely glammed up to match Catherine Deneuve’s bountiful blondeness. The character’s shining half-hour came in two parts—a spectacular witness-stand meltdown in which she hysterically confessed her promiscuous past to save a friend from being convicted of murder.

This 15-minute fire-and-light show is one of “TV Guide’s Most Memorable Moments on TV.” The subtext is apparent, said Ms. Light. “If you watch it, think what it means for someone to come out. The process of coming out is revealing a secret where you are sure you will be rejected, but you have to do it because you have no other choice. You’re saying, ‘This is who I really am. It’s not the person you think I should be or that I want to be. I am this way. I want to live my life this way.’”

One Life to Live paid off for Ms. Light in back-to-back Emmys in 1980 and 1981 and a hubby for life: Robert Desiderio entered the small-screen picture as a bad guy (in a gang of three that also included a pre-Married ... with Children Ed O’Neill and her once and future Lombardi, Dan Lauria). “I had lots of scenes with Robert,” she recalled. “We were attracted to each other instantly, but they weren’t love scenes at first. It turned into that when the writers saw the way we were playing it and the subtext we were creating for ourselves. They saw the chemistry and started putting it in the writing.”

The Desiderioes went West when their One Life characters left the show at the end of ’82, and the cache of two Emmys netted Ms. Light star parts in sitcoms—notably, naturally, Angela Bower, the alpha-female ad exec who hired Tony Danza to housekeep, etc., on Who’s the Boss? There have been scads of TV movies and series since—Phenom, The Simple Life, The Stones, Ugly Betty, Law & Order: SVU—stretching all the way to TNT’s Dallas, which she just swore off after eight episodes earlier this month to concentrate on the Greenberg play (it’s said he wrote it with her in mind).

Mr. Telsey knew her from her work on television. “I grew up watching her on TV on One Life to Live,” he recalled. “You can make fun of a soap opera if you want, but she was genius on that show—and she was one of those people who was in my brain, always, to go, ‘How do I get that woman on stage?’”

TWO WEEKS DEEP INTO REHEARSAL, Ms. Light spoke of The Assembled Parties guardedly and in generalities, perhaps hoping to preserve its surprises. Act I takes place in 1980, Act II in 2000—Mr. Greenberg is fond of generation-jumping (Three Days of Rain)—and the show’s focus is how a well-to-do Jewish family fares over the decades.

“My character, in this particular play, is a woman who has made what she considers to be a terrible mistake and had to get married,” she explained. “This happens around 1949, 1950. And she is cut off by her mother, who denies her the closeness that they once had. The thing that’s happening is that Jessica Hecht’s character—my sister-in-law—does something that transforms my whole life and my whole relationship to her. The Assembled Parties is about making a relationship, and making a family, out of people who are not necessarily family. It’s about connections, making connections.” Her performance promises to be impressive, if her turn in Eric Simonson’s Lombardi two years ago is any gauge. In 244 performances, she played the ultimate in football widows, Marie (Mrs. Vince) Lombardi, who treated her loneliness with stiff drinks.

“I knew from the start—from the first reading—that she absolutely got the character,” Mr. Simonson recalled. “She understood the humor, which was key to understanding the role.””

But it wasn’t just that. “Judith was a consummate professional in rehearsal,” he said, “extremely positive in nature, never said a bad word about anybody—and the cast came to call her ‘Mom.’”

After the curtain falls or the series fails, there is still Light. When America Ferrera, her Ugly Betty co-star, did a stage turn for the Women’s Project recently in Bethany, Ms. Light led the opening-night cheering session. When Lily Rabe, her daughter in MCC’s Colder Than Here, won the Actors’ Equity Callaway Award for playing Portia in The Merchant of Venice, she was the kveller in the crowd. When Danny Pinatauro, her son for 196 Who’s the Boss? episodes, made his stage debut at the Duplex as a street hustler in The Velocity of Gary, “Mom” was down front, beaming.

Lombardi got her a Tony nomination. The Tony itself came last year for following Linda Lavin’s Off-Broadway act when Jon Robin Baitz’s Pulitzer-contending Other Desert Cities went to Broadway: a visiting relative politically out of sync in a Republican California home, fresh out of rehab and flinging stinging zingers right and right.

Of course, none of it might have happened without Wit. “They believed in me,” Ms. Light said. “I’d done nothing on stage for 22 years, and they gave me a shot. I still remember a review I got that said, ‘This person wouldn’t be your first or your 500th choice for Wit—but, oh my goodness!’”

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Victoria Clark in 'Cindarella.' (Courtesy Carol Rosegg)

Douglas Carter Beane is aflutter these days, flitting from one fairyland to another like a hummingbird in heat. These are fairylands of his own making or, in the case of his Cinderella, which is bowing March 3 at the Broadway Theatre, remaking; his from-the-ground-up original play The Nance follows suit April 15 at the Lyceum.

Both efforts have been research-intensive. For the lady with the glass slipper, he went back three centuries to the French source; for the effete theatrical stereotype known during the last gasps of vaudeville as the nance, he canvassed gay history of the previous century and came up with a Nathan Lane vehicle that’s tailor-made for the actor’s sad-clown Emmett Kelly side.

“I like researching,” Mr. Beane insisted in a recent interview, “which is funny, because I have been considered Mr. Topical Humor, Mr. Contemporary, Mr. What’s-in-the-News-Today-and-How-Can-I-Get-It-Into-the-Theater? for so long.”

He was speaking to The Observer by phone last week from the bowels of Lincoln Center while director Jack O’Brien was prepping The Nance for a place on Broadway.

Surprisingly, there wasn’t a trace of weariness in his description of the hectic life he’s been leading in the past few weeks. “I write rewrites for Cinderella till noon,” he said, “and then I come to The Nance rehearsal in the afternoon, and then I see Cinderella at night, and then after midnight I do rewrites for The Nance. I have a multiple-personality disorder, so it’s all fine.”

So what, precisely, is a nance? “A nance,” he explained, “is a burlesque term for a gay comic character—the worst type of stereotype of an effeminate gay man. Think Franklin Pangborn in the movies. In burlesque, it was much more risqué and bawdy. Often, nance acts were called ‘pansy acts.’ They were very much a part of the late ’20s/early ’30s. By the late ’30s, they were out of favor.”

(Even Pangborn saw fit to douse his flamboyance. Notice how sensitive, subtle and sneakily funny he is tailoring Gary Cooper’s suit in 1936’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.)

Several planets had to align for Mr. Beane to write The Nance, starting with his communal pride. He lives near Irving Place and East 15th Street, the former site of the Irving Place Theatre, a big Broadway-sized house built in 1860 for concerts, balls and lectures. It subsequently played host to Amberg’s German Theater, Yiddish Art Theatre, burlesque, union meetings, theatrical presentations and cinema.

Mr. Beane zeroed in on the burlesque period, and in 2005 he did a benefit evening of burlesque for the theater company he ran, The Drama Dept., filling out the bill of fare with sketches he uncovered at Lincoln Center Library. A recurring character was identified as The Nance, but Mr. Beane didn’t really connect with it until he read George Chauncey’s book Gay New York.

All these particles were floating in the air five years ago, when he went to Sundance’s Ucross Writers’ Retreat in Wyoming. “They literally throw you in a cabin for three weeks,” he said. “You can’t have anything ready to go in the beginning. You just have to do something, so I sat there, put it all together and started writing—with Nathan Lane in mind. I wrote the first act and one scene of the second act. Then I took some time and finished it and sent it off to Nathan. He was doing The Addams Family. I said, ‘I wrote something for you. I think it’s special.’ I sent it to him at 5, and he called me at 9 the next day to say he read it, loved it and wanted to do it. Highlight of my career!”

Although a nance was usually played by a straight, the one played by Mr. Lane—named (please note) Chauncey Miles—is gay. “It’s a sexual story, a romantic story. It’s about the quality of self-loathing that many gay men have in their lives: what causes that, how it’s going away to some degree and how it remains to another degree.

“I think what The Nance is most like is John Osborne’s The Entertainer, in that it’s very dramatic, then it flips and goes into these comedy sketches—a bittersweet love story juxtaposed with outrageous burlesque performances. It’s an incredible spectrum Nathan would have to bring to the part. I knew he could do it and knew from conversations I’ve had with him that he’d connect with scenes in the play.”

Mr. Beane’s second adventure in fairyland this season has Rodgers and Hammerstein as collaborators, in what will be their last Broadway show—Cinderella, the stage version of their 90-minute TV show that CBS aired live March 31, 1957.

Julie Andrews was the first Cinderella, Lesley Ann Warren the second in 1965, Brandy the third in 1997—and the law of diminishing returns was very much in effect. This stage edition is an attempt to “take out the improvements,” as Mr. Beane puts it, and return to home base—in particular to Robert Russell Bennett’s orchestrations, which have been lovingly preserved by David Chase, Andy Einhorn and Bruce Coughlin.

The whole score is represented, even “Royal Dressing Room Scene” (“Your Majesties”), which the King and Queen (Howard Lindsay and Dorothy Stickney) sang. These majesties—the characters—didn’t make the stage cut, but their melody lingers on as background music while people line up for the royal banquet.

The standards survived: the plaintive “In My Own Little Corner,” the buoyant “A Lovely Night” and “Impossible; It’s Possible,” the wistful “Do I Love You Because You’re Beautiful?” and the exquisitely lilting “Ten Minutes Ago.” Has television ever had a more tuneful hour and a half? For that matter, has Broadway of late?

When people say they know the Cinderella story, what they usually know is The Fable According to Walt Disney, circa 1950, but there’s considerably more bibbidy-bobbidi-boo where that came from, as Mr. Beane learned when he tracked it back to Charles Perrault’s original 1697 French version.

“He’s the guy who came up with the whole glass-slipper idea—Venetian glass was very posh in those days—as well as Mother Goose, Puss in Boots, Little Red Riding Hood. He even came up with the expression ‘fairy tale.’ When I read the original, I thought, ‘That’s amazing! Why don’t we ever get to see this version?’ There’s so much more to the story. Cinderella was kind in a world that was sarcastic and full of ridicule. She saw the prince more than one time—she saw him a series of times, in fact. She had a sister who was actually a friend and had a beau of her own.”

His biggest discovery came about because he has a partner—Lewis Finn, who wrote the songs for Mr. Beane’s Lysistrata Jones—who happens to speak French. “Lewis read the original French version and said, ‘Oh, my God! The first time she loses the shoe, then retrieves it. The second time she leaves the shoe.’ The actual French verb was ‘leave.’ I was like, ‘Wow! People will think I’m the most controversial, forward-thinking writer of my generation—and it’s really from 1697!’”

In this production, the climatic slipper-fitting contest seems somewhat superfluous, since Cinderella and her prince—elegantly represented here by Laura Osnes and Santino Fontana—always recognize each other, thanks to costume designer William Ivey Long’s having made sure they’re color-coordinated. And he has engineered for her a couple of spectacular on-stage presto changos.

He works comparable wardrobe wonders on Victoria Clark’s Crazy Marie, who instantaneously turns on a dime from a beggar lady into the Fairy Godmother—a transformation trick Mr. Beane took from Prokofiev’s ballet version.

In the Beane reimagining, the big difference is that Cinderella and the prince are both orphans. While the prince is away at school, the kingdom is being run (into the ground) by his superciliously sinister secretary of protocol, played by Peter Bartlett via Cyril Ritchard. Upon his return, the prince is offered up for marital sacrifice, and high jinks ensue, with Mr. Bartlett forming a comically unholy alliance with Harriet Harris, Cinderella’s nasty stepmother, to tip the scales toward her other daughters.

Democratically, the Rodgers and Hammerstein wealth is spread around. “I like to do that—I think it comes from my days with The Drama Dept.,” said Mr. Beane. “When you have really wonderful actors like Marla Mindelle and Greg Hildreth [Sister Mary Robert of Sister Act and Alf of Peter and the Starcatcher], you want to give them stuff to do.”

What these two are given to do is songs from other Rodgers and Hammersteins: Ms. Mindelle, as the good stepsister, tra-las with Mr. Hildreth, her rabble-rousing true love, “I Haven’t Got a Worry in the World,” which Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote for an Anita Loos-Helen Hayes vehicle that they produced, Happy Birthday. (This 1946 play will be revived from March 12 through April 13 by The Acting Company Theater—sans that song.) Mr. Hildreth’s social conscience is expressed early on in a song, “Now Is the Time,” which was nearly Emile de Becque’s and still lingers on somewhere in South Pacific just as music. Cut from the second act of Me and Juliet, “Me, Who Am I?” is used here to introduce the prince in an identity crisis.

“Additional lyrics” are credited to Mr. Chase and Mr. Beane, who got a ghostly assist. “Because it was written while Oscar Hammerstein was in Australia and Richard Rodgers was in New York, a lot of the development process was written by letter,” explained Mr. Beane. “I got to read these letters, see a bit of a lyric idea here, something they abandoned there. It was like forensics lyric-writing. Everything in the show is pretty much an idea they had. We just formulated them into the show.”

editorial@observer.com

Holland Taylor as Ann W. Richards in 'Ann.'

Holland Taylor has had it with these people who order “painfully dry vodka martinis.” Pa-lease! “First of all, that’s not a martini because a martini is gin,” she pointed out in a recent interview. “Not that I’m a person very opinionated about it, but the original ratio of gin to vermouth in a martini was one to three. Now, people swish it around in a glass, throw it out and call that a martini. The whole thing is the interaction of the vermouth with the gin. It’s a chemical interaction. When I taste a well-made martini, I think, ‘If I could just hold on to this taste forever, it’d be great.’”

If Ms. Taylor is in a sublime state of mind these days, that state is Texas. She’s playing the late, great governor of that state—Ann W. Richards—in a one-person show called Ann, which she herself concocted (her first play). It commences previews Feb. 18 for an opening at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theatre on March 7. Ms. Taylor, all 5-foot-4 of her, will be filling the Beaumont’s Texas-size stage by herself.

You might have taken Ms. Richards for a bourbon-and-branch-water sort of gal—but no, according to her Boswell: “Ann drank a vodka martini with a twist—she was not a purist like me—and, when she quit drinking, she did AA. It got to a point where even a martini wouldn’t do what a few beers used to do, so she quit of her own accord.”

Ms. Richards, a tiny terrier of a Texan, tore a hole in the Lone Star State. She was the only liberal in eons to hold the state’s top office and the first woman to get there on her own steam (thus disqualifying Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who was twice elected Texas governor as a proxy for her impeached hubby, James “Pa” Ferguson).

The reign of terrier was short (1991-1995), scrappy and singular. She was defeated for re-election by George W. Bush, who avenged a crack she had made in her 1988 Democratic National Convention keynote address about his malapropping pop, then Reagan’s vice president. “Poor George, he can’t help it,” Ms. Richards lazily drawled. “He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.”

The line was written, and slipped to her, by Lily Tomlin’s comedy-writing partner, Jane Wagner, but you’ll not find it in Ann—primarily because Ms. Taylor wanted to keep things as apolitical as possible. Feminists on all fronts were forever spicing up Ms. Richards’s speeches with stinging zingers, and the other legendary Richards line is included: “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.” That came from Linda Ellerbee, who got it from a guy on a plane.

Governor Richards was a formidable, funny lady—qualities that Ms. Taylor exudes in spades. And they’re a pretty good match physically—sleek cheekbones topped with a Dairy Queen ’do that became a Richards trademark.

Ms. Taylor did meet her subject up close once, over lunch at Le Cirque, introduced through their mutual friend Liz Smith, the columnist. “It didn’t have much to do with my writing the play, though. It was just a grace note.” She regrets not pursuing the relationship and took Ms. Richards’s passing harder than she expected. From the grief came the play.

Researching Ann was a four-year immersion. She interviewed family, friends, foes, co-workers, political allies and enemies, anyone who had a story to tell about Dorothy Ann Willis—as Ann Richards started out in life—and a complicated, even contradictory, endlessly fascinating character began emerging.

“She had had a very criticizing kind of mother and a softie for a daddy who adored her,” said Ms. Taylor. “I got a picture of this duality in her life. She was a wonderful boss but a hard boss. Her secretaries, when she was governor, would go out to the lawn of the capitol and get some air, eat their little half-sandwich for lunch and cry. They were exhausted by the way she drove them and her expectations of them. Many of her staffers would tell funny, awful stories about working for her, and there’d be tears in their eyes because they loved her so much.”

The script, which ran 32 single-spaced pages, was tweaked and pared down during six tryout stops en route to Lincoln Center. “Lincoln Center wasn’t on our radar at all,” she said. “We’d been playing huge houses—the big Shubert in Chicago, the Eisenhower at the Kennedy Center, opera houses in Galveston and San Antonio—and we expected to be in a classic Broadway house, so, when Bob Boyett, our producer, called to tell me that we were going to Lincoln Center, I was speechless. When I did gather myself, I said, ‘Well, Ann deserves it.’”

Her performance in Ann will be the first time in almost three decades that Ms. Taylor has set foot on a Broadway stage. The last time was Feb. 22, 1983, the opening—and closing—night of Moose Murders. Frank Rich nailed it in his Times review: “From now on, there will always be two groups of theatergoers in this world: those who have seen Moose Murders, and those who have not.”

The play did not stay dead, however. It rose again Jan. 30 waaaay off Broadway in the East Village, but critics shouted it off the stage again.

“I’ve blocked it out mostly as best I can,” Ms. Taylor admitted. “When I read the script, I realized right off it was a vanity piece. Originally, I was offered a different part, and, although I thought some of the dialogue was funny, I didn’t think it was a play, so I passed. Eventually, they got Eve Arden to star in the thing for Broadway.”

Ms. Arden soon recognized there was no comedy to be found in the piece, refused to take her curtain calls and bolted during early previews. “I had to learn the part and go on in seven days,” Ms. Taylor recalled. “I had one week’s rehearsal before performing it. We previewed it one night. Its misguidedness was Shakespearean, but things happened that were funny because they were so awful; all you could do was throw up your hands and surrender.”

On opening night, her blackout line resulted in disaster. “It was only mildly funny, but I said it, and the lights did not go out, and the curtain did not come down. As I realized that the worst possible thing that could happen—other than dying of a heart attack on stage—had indeed happened, I saw the others in the cast trying to slink offstage. I said, ‘Come back here!’ All of them came back, we took hands, and I said, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, that is our play.’ So, yes, I guess I have a funny memory.”

The show, she said, “was hard to do, but I think, by God, I showed the industry that I had some grit.”

To say nothing of some class, which elevated her above the whole situation. This quality came into sharper focus three months later, when she and Keith Charles moved their Off Broadway comedy Breakfast With Les and Bess, into the Lamb’s Theatre and, as a celebrity radio couple, made bright, sparkling banter together.

She has returned several times to Off Broadway—The Vagina Monologues and such—and done some theater in Los Angeles, most notably Yasmina Reza’s The Unexpected Man with Christopher Lloyd and director Gil Cates, but her major inroads have been in television and features. She has been nominated for seven Emmys—for The Practice (2), The Lot (1)
and Two and a Half Men (4)—and won one for The Practice, hoisting it high in the air and declaring to one and all, “Overnight!”

At 70, Ms. Taylor has evolved from Moose Murders into our own Eve Arden—a classy comedienne hurling quips from on high, smart, sexy and sophisticated. And her regal bearing is for real, too: she’s from Tracy Lord country—Philadelphia’s Main Line.

“You could not say anything grander to me,” she said of the Arden comparison. “I adored her. She had cards made—Christmas cards, I think—a cartoon drawing of a moose head on a wall, with holly on it, and in the face of the moose was Eve’s own face. On the inside, her message to me was, ‘Thanks for taking the heat. Love, Eve.’

“Everybody gets typecast. You are thought of as doing such-and-such a thing well, so you’re asked to do it a lot. The thing that pleases me most about the way Ann has unfolded is that in no way did I have any intention of writing this play. I tell you, I feel like I had a bag thrown over my head and I was thrown into this pirate ship, the Good Ship Ann, and I was swept away by it. In fact, Ann answers something quite important for me as an actress, which is how they always cast me as these brittle, showy or surface-light witches, always a cold kind of woman—as I often have been, like in The Practice, which was an important role for me and one I adored.

“Ann is the heat of a million suns. Ann is warm, really warm and connected to people—and that’s not the kind of role I’m asked to play. When I’m waiting to go out for the second act, I’m eager to get back out there, and the audience is eager to get back, too—because we all want is to get out in that glow, and the glow is Ann.”

editorial@observer.com