Mackenzie Crook, “Jerusalem” and Stage-Struck Turtles

“I inherited a pair of turtles when I was 13,” explains Mackenzie Crook, “They had been in the family at that point for at least 60 years…That’s 25 years ago, so these things are in their eighties.  Every year they produce a clutch of eggs, and I hatch them out.”

Crook, who has made a name for himself playing off-beat character parts in the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies and the UK sitcom “The Office,” received a Tony nomination for his work in Jez Butterworth’s hit play “Jerusalem,” which moved from the West End to Broadway this season.  “Jerusalem” takes its name from William Blake’s stirring poem and tells the story of former daredevil Johnny ‘Rooster’ Byron (played by Mark Rylance), the squatter cum bard of a Wiltshire woodland.  Byron and his band of followers—led by Ginger (Mackenzie Crook)—are a menace to the peaceful and increasingly sterile inhabitants of the English countryside.  They are today’s eccentrics, armed with cocaine, teenage lovers…and one stage-struck turtle, in the arms of its proud owner.

Crook has an unmistakable, unlikely kind of brilliance. With impeccably timed artlessness, he is at once the creation of this moment and an endearing, enduring oddity in the vein of Rowan Atkinson or Peter Sellers.  Crook even happens to live in Sellers’s former London house. “It was just a coincidence” Crook admits, ”I’d just finished filming my couple of days on ‘The Life and Death of Peter Sellers,’ the Geoffrey Rush movie…We went to look round this house, decided it was perfect for us, and then the woman who was selling it told us on the way out that Peter Sellers lived there in the fifties…That was the icing on the cake….”

But Crook did not always find himself in such exalted surroundings.  Though he professes to know little about the theater (having arrived at the West End when he was already in his thirties), Crook spent a decade performing in variety and stand-up comedy shows.  “I wasn’t a straight stand-up—as in it was just me and a microphone. I always did a character, and had costume, make-up, and whatever went with that character. Though I used to perform in stand-up comedy clubs, it was very much more a monologue, a character monologue that could be interrupted and switched around….”

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‘Lyrics and Lyricists’ celebrates the nightclubs of New York

El Morocco, The Copacabana, The Plaza’s Persian Room—New York’s legendary nightclubs of days gone by. The very names conjure the glamour of another era: Elizabeth Taylor is still dancing the rumba with Richard Burton, Ethel Merman is Queen of Broadway, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor are the royal romance on everybody’s lips. Last weekend, the 92^nd Street Y’s Lyrics and Lyricists series, a New York institution in its own right, paid homage to those late great clubs.

Artistic director and host Deborah Grace Winer wove a witty history of those boîtes, from the first cave men sitting around the fire to the heyday of café society in first half of the twentieth century. The legacy of Darwin’s Darlings and Bobby Darin was in good hands. Grammy award winner Billy Stritch crooned away at “Breezin’ Along with the Breeze”, and reminded audiences how capable he is away from the piano—that is, when he is not busy being Liza Minnelli’s musical director. Karen Ziemba, formidable triple threat and Tony Award winner from Contact, was equally charming with a song whose title says it all, “I’d Rather Cha-Cha Than Eat.” And fans of TV’s Gossip Girl would flatly refuse to believe James Naughton’s (aka William Vanderbilt) enchantingly goofy rendition of Dave Frishberg’s pastiche song “I’m Hip.”

In the company of those performers, that dearly departed world seemed well-tended and accessible, if not tangible. We may not have Wallis and Edward, but we do have Catherine and William. Chic civilization is safe.

Terri White, “Follies” at the Kennedy Center

In days of yore, when Broadway shows had real out-of-town tryouts, news would trickle in from Philadelphia, New Haven, or Baltimore about next season’s hit. Today, the news from Washington is most encouraging, and appropriately about a show brimming with nostalgia. Though the Kennedy Center’s new production of Follies can hardly be deemed a tryout (as no Broadway run has yet been announced), it has all the makings of a smash in any town. The cast of Stephen Sondheim‘s cult backstage musical includes Bernadette Peters (Sally Durant Plummer), Elaine Paige (Carlotta Campion), and Linda Lavin (Hattie Walker), who will portray the stars of a long-forgotten revue reunited in their old stomping ground. Among those performers, many of them fresh from Broadway runs, is the indomitable, irresistible Terri White in the role of Stella Deems, a down and out hoofer who now runs a store in Miami.

The character has particular resonance for White, familiar to theater goers from Cy Coleman’s Barnum and the long-running Nunsense, who herself was absent from Broadway for two decades and even homeless for part of that time. Last season saw her reemerge on the big ring radar in the latest revival of Finian’s Rainbow. Like Stella Deems, Terri White is back to strut her stuff.

But White’s interpretation of the character is not just drawn from personal experience; it also has a lot to do with history. White recalls the TOBA (Theater Owners Booking Association) circuit, which specialized in African-American vaudeville acts. Performers offered an alternate meaning for the  acronym: Tough On Black Asses.

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‘Jerusalem’ Comes to Broadway

There is a quiet revolution afoot. In an idyllic corner of the English countryside, motorcyclist Rooster Byron lives in a rusty old trailer, much to the horror of the town council which is more than willing to purge him from the landscape. Equally damaging is his drug-ridden family and protégés, who kick up a rumpus at the slightest provocation.

Jez Butterworth’s new play, Jerusalem, may not portray the England of Brideshead Revisited, but it does suggest a world equally in flux. City Money and postcard preservation have long since overrun the countryside, and are steadily eradicating the eccentricity and Romanticism which are its hallmarks. Rooster Byron, a rebel in the true sense, displays those qualities in peculiar abundance, and is under siege from every side. Jerusalem, which takes its name from a poem by William Blake, seeks a new answer to an old question, ‘Who will inherit England?’

And who will inherit Broadway? After a smash hit in London and good buzz surrounding the New York previews, Jerusalem may well be the Brit hit that crosses the Pond intact. The play’s star, Mark Rylance, seems to have persevered after his ill-fated run in La Bête, which not only shares the same producer with Jerusalem, but also the same theater.  When Jerusalem opens Thursday night, New York will no doubt find a fresh and able cast directed by Ian Rickson, including Mackenzie Crook (star of the BBC’s version of The Office), John Gallagher, Jr., and Max Baker, ready to offer unusually bright theater in the Broadway main ring.

Jerusalem opens Thursday, April 21st at The Music Box Theatre, 239 West 45^th Street.