We just came back from seeing “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks,” the new play starring Mark Hamill and Polly Bergen currently in previews on Broadway at the Belasco Theater. Seeing a show in previews, when the kinks are supposed to be worked out, can always be an adventure. In last night’s performance, for instance, the sound system was so out of whack that three minutes into the show, the feedback was practically rupturing everyone’s eardrums. Bergen suddenly dropped character, announced that this was simply unacceptable and she walked off the stage. Mark stood there flummoxed for a moment, then turned to the audience and said hopefully, “So…want to know how a light saber works?”
Twenty minutes later they finally got the sound running properly, earning the gratitude of both cast and audience, and the play started over again.
Fortunately enough, the performance we saw tonight went off without a hitch. Hamill plays a dance instructor hired to come to the home of a baptist minister’s wife and, as the title would imply, spend the next six weeks giving her dance lessons. The reason I call it “Dancing Miss Daisy” is that, at its core, it’s about an aging Southern woman, disconnected from the world, who finds a way of coping with her environment through the most unlikely of touchstones (her character is actually named Lily, but hey…daisy. Lily. Close enough). The characters are engaging, the show is briskly paced, and there’s enough unexpected revelations about both protagonists (it’s a two-person play) to keep you wondering what’s going to be sprung on you next.
What was also classy about Mark was that his throat was getting so strained by the end of the show that the theater personnel had arranged for him to be brought directly to an emergency room afterward to have it treated. Yet despite that, he stopped and signed autographs and posed for pictures with waiting fans.
Support the theater, support Broadway, and support Mark (whose “Comic Book: The Movie” comes out in January on DVD from Miramax.)
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