Appreciations of the late Natasha Richardson continue to pour in, the British ones focusing understandably
on the film work of the 45-year-old actress who died suddenly and tragically earlier this week and on her dynastic status as perhaps the most shining of numerous heirs to the Redgrave talent. New York, meanwhile, has commemorated Richardson in quite a different manner, as has been seen by footage of the quite extraordinary encounters in which Richardson’s mother, Vanessa Redgrave, and husband, Liam Neeson, did a theater district walkabout in order to pay thanks to friends, colleagues, and fans for their expressions of love and support.
The fact is, Richardson was that rare London talent who gave herself over pretty entirely to the Broadway theater and left a grateful American public in thrall to her every stage appearance – and in very real mourning now. Lots of British performers triumph on Broadway, scooping up Tonys on the way. But how often have Pauline Collins, Stephen Dillane, Jeremy Irons, and Janet McTeer, to name just a few, returned to Broadway since they made their marks and won their prizes? In the case of the first two, not once, while Irons and McTeer are only back on Broadway this season, in Irons’s case a full quarter-century since he stormed 45th Street in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing.
Richardson actually was the real thing – a theater artist by not divine but genetic right who loved the Broadway community and let New York know it: after all, money aside, O’Neill, Marber, Williams, and Masteroff, Kander and Ebb are considerably more rewarding – aren’t they? – than remakes of The Parent Trap. The point is, a lot of performers would have retreated happily to the wings following the astonishing success Richardson had in the Sam Mendes/Rob Marshall Roundabout Theatre revival of Cabaret, her Sally Bowles in every way a repudiation of the celebratory take on the part so famously proffered on screen by Liza Minnelli: I’ll never forget Richardson’s hair-raising reappraisal of the show’s title song, delivered as the last, desperate gasp of a fantasist in thrall to the forces of the Third Reich gathering around her. Jane Horrocks had attempted something of the same coup de theatre when Mendes mounted an earlier version of the same musical at London’s Donmar Warehouse, but it took someone of Richardson’s talent to sell the deeply neurotic sizzle via a Sally who broke your heart, all the while suggesting that something deep within her was broken, too.
But far from vanishing from view to tend to her much-deserved Tony, Richardson was back on the New York stage the very next season, lending an effortless allure and – a wonderful paradox, this – a coolly defining heat to the Broadway debut of Patrick Marber’s wonderful Closer, a play co-produced by the very man, Robert Fox, to whom Richardson had been married when she made her Broadway debut in Anna Christie for the Roundabout opposite Neeson, who then became her second husband. Even that shift in spouses made sense, given Richardson’s fervor for New York. In Fox, Richardson had a partner who, like herself, was part of a theater family, with all the aesthetic and emotional pros and cons that phenomenon brings with it. Neeson, by contrast, was from Irish stock of an altogether different sort, and he no doubt represented maritally much the same freedom Richardson revelled in when she spoke of New York, a town where she could very much forge her own career without always being shadowed by that of her mother. (Or Aunt Lynn, though, as it turns out, Lynn Redgrave was one of Richardson’s fellow Tony nominees for Best Actress in 1993 when both women lost to the late Madeline Kahn, for The Sisters Rosensweig.)
With family dynamics in mind, it was particularly moving to hear that Richardson and Redgrave were planning to reteam for a full Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, having appeared at the start of this year in a one-off benefit of the 1973 musical. Enough time had clearly elapsed that both women could share a Broadway stage with equally moving grace and heft – Redgrave now a semi-regular visitor to a street from which she had been too long absent during the late ’70s and most of the ’80s, Richardson the next generation who conquered Broadway her first time out (in Anna Christie) and kept doing so throughout.
At this point, following Richardson’s all too surreal death, it’s hard not to think of Redgrave’s own recent stage appearance in The Year of Magical Thinking, playing a woman who has lost both a husband and a daughter, as Redgrave herself now has. If Richardson’s passing seems particularly unthinkable in the Manhattan where the actress lived, it’s because life, in cruelly imitating art, has snatched from its midst an erstwhile British visitor to New York who with time became a beloved and invaluable Broadway mainstay.
Tags: London Theatre Reviews