THE MORNING LINE
DATE: Monday, April 7, 2014
FROM: Emily Meagher, Michelle Farabaugh Connor Davis
PAGES: 28, including this page
April 4, 2014
‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ to Return for Arena Tour By Dave Itzkoff
Hosanna hey or hosanna huh? “Jesus Christ Superstar,” Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s musical about the final days of Jesus, will soon rise again, this time as a arena show that will feature an eclectic roster of rock and pop artists and will tour North America starting in June.
This new production of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which was announced Friday morning on “Good Morning America,” will feature Brandon Boyd of the rock band Incubus as Judas Iscariot; JC Chasez of *NSYNC as Pontius Pilate; Michelle Williams of Destiny’s Child as Mary Magdalene; and John Lydon (a k a Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols) as King Herod. The tour will also star Ben Forster, the winner of a British reality- TV casting competition, as Jesus.
Performances will begin on June 9 at the Lakefront Arena in New Orleans, and the tour is expected to conclude on Aug. 17 at the Wells Fargo Arena in Philadelphia. (Other area dates include an Aug. 5 performance at Madison Square Garden in New York.) “Jesus Christ Superstar,” which began as a concept album in 1970 and has spawned numerous stage productions, was last presented on Broadway in 2012, starring Paul Nolan as Jesus and Josh Young as Judas Iscariot.
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April 6, 2014
Powerhouse Theater Summer Season
By Adam Kepler Among the highlights of the summer season for the Powerhouse Theater will be “In Your Arms,” a collection of wordless dance vignettes written by playwrights like Terrence McNally, Christopher Durang, Carrie Fisher, Douglas Carter Beane and Lynn Nottage, with music by Stephen Flaherty (“Ragtime”) and choreography by Christopher Gattelli (“Newsies”). Produced by New York Stage and Film and Vassar College, the season is also to include new plays by Richard Greenberg (“Take Me Out”) and John Patrick Shanley (“Doubt”) and is scheduled to begin on June 20 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.
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April 6, 2014
Plugging Away at Living, Come What May ‘Realistic Joneses’ Stars Toni Collette and Michael C. Hall
By Charles Isherwood
Plays as funny and moving, as wonderful and weird as “The Realistic Joneses,” by Will Eno, do not appear often on Broadway. Or ever, really. You’re as likely to see a tumbleweed lolloping across 42nd Street as you are to see something as daring as Mr. Eno’s meditation on the confounding business of being alive (or not) sprouting where only repurposed movies, plays by dead people and blaring musicals tend to thrive.
Broadway has long been a place inhospitable to the truly active currents of contemporary theater, so the opening of Mr. Eno’s play at the Lyceum Theater on Sunday night, in a production insured against instantaneous death (one hopes) by the presence of a few name stars — Toni Collette, Michael C. Hall and Marisa Tomei, alongside the less famous but no less gifted Tracy Letts — is an occasion worth celebrating.
And I hope the word “weird” doesn’t scare you off: Mr. Eno’s voice may be the most singular of his generation, but it’s humane, literate and slyly hilarious. He makes the most mundane language caper and dance, revealing how absurd attempts at communication can be. He also burrows into the heart of his characters to reveal the core of their humanity: the fear and loneliness and unspoken love that mostly remains hidden beneath the surface as we plug away at life, come what may.
An awful lot, or a lot of awful, may be in store for the characters in “The Realistic Joneses,” which is easily his most accessible play (others include the Pulitzer Prize-finalist “Thom Pain (based on nothing)” and “Middletown”). It has been ushered onto Broadway with a gentle hand by the director Sam Gold, who allows his terrific cast to find its own way into the twisting grooves of Mr. Eno’s writing.
The play opens on a bucolic tableau that finds Bob and Jennifer Jones (Mr. Letts and Ms. Collette) idling through an evening at the picnic table in their backyard, exchanging nothing-much conversation that carries an undercurrent of unease.
“It just seems like we don’t talk,” Jennifer says, after Bob has dodged her attempts to turn the conversation into serious channels.
“What are we doing right now, math?” Bob replies, with an edge in his deadpan.
“No, we’re — I don’t know — sort of throwing words at each other,” his wife says.
A rustling in the garbage cans signals the arrival of the new neighbors, John (Mr. Hall) and Pony (Ms. Tomei), who bring a festive-looking bottle that, tellingly, remains unopened. They share the same last name and have come to this corner of the world because, as the bubbly Pony explains: “I always wanted to live in one of these little towns near the mountains. So one night, he comes home and literally just says, literally — I forget what you said exactly.”
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“Just, something about moving to one of these little towns near the mountains,” John helpfully replies.
When Bob goes in search of glasses, Jennifer impulsively reveals the reason for their own move to the town: Bob has a degenerative disease, and a leading doctor in the field happens to live here. The treatments are experimental, and the prognosis isn’t rosy.
Suddenly embarrassed at divulging so much to strangers, Jennifer says sheepishly, “I’m sorry, I just kind of blurted that all out.”
John says: “That’s all right. That’s what separates us from the animal. You never hear animals blurting things out. Unless they’re being run over by a car or something.”
The disjointed push and pull of Mr. Eno’s dialogue is not easy to master: He emphasizes the way in which we so often do throw words at one another, although most of us don’t have the arsenal of curveballs that, say, John does. You may come out of this play hearing a new strangeness — and perhaps a lunatic beauty — in the way a casual conversation can unfold, or at least wishing that your interactions held the entrancing oddity of Mr. Eno’s characters’.
The actors slip into its herky-jerky tempos with no apparent effort. I saw the play at its premiere at Yale Repertory Theater, with a mostly different foursome (only Mr. Letts remains), and feared that the necessity of casting stars for a Broadway run would foul up the works. It has not, thanks in part to Mr. Gold, who has become a consummate director of adventurous new writing for the theater.
Mr. Hall may be considered a first among equals, if only because his character, who harbors a secret from his wife that he reveals to Jennifer, has the most entertaining non sequiturs. Having appeared in the cable series “Six Feet Under” and “Dexter,” Mr. Hall certainly is at home riding the currents of anxiety in Mr. Eno’s play. But his performance is most rewarding for its buoyancy, the manner in which Mr. Hall imbues his character’s despair with an offhand lightness of touch, as if a festering sore were just a scratch.
Mr. Letts, a Tony winner last year for his hair-raising performance in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” brings a laconic yearning to Bob, who has chosen to confront the fact of his illness by ignoring it. A scene in which Bob steals up to Pony and John’s house in the middle of the night, and the two men exchange moderately hostile chitchat as they contemplate the night sky (“No, I’m looking at this part,” John insists, “you look over there”), is among the evening’s finest and funniest.
Ms. Collette exudes a touching, exasperated dignity as Jennifer, who finds herself in unexpected intimacy with John, even as she cannot seem to breach the bulwark that her own husband has marshaled as a defense against his fears. And Ms. Tomei radiates chipper energy as Pony, an air of desperate cheeriness that keeps faltering, like a sparkler sputtering in the dark. (I must, however, pause here to give a shout-out to the sublime Parker Posey, who memorably created this role in New Haven.)
The evolving relationship between the two couples forms the plot, such as it is, of “The Realistic Joneses.” By Mr. Eno’s standards, there’s actually quite a bit of “drama”: There’s that ominous specter of death waiting in the wings, of course, but also the potential of both marriages fracturing as the characters reveal, obliquely, their frustrations and disappointments, with themselves and one another.
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David Zinn’s rustic-suburban set looks great on the Lyceum’s stage, with its soaring black backdrop somehow suggesting the cosmic. the sound design of Leon Rothenberg, with a hooting owl and a night chorus of crickets, echoes that feeling, of the immensity of the natural world cradling the characters.
But don’t come to the play expecting tidy resolutions, clearly drawn narrative arcs or familiarly typed characters. “The Realistic Joneses” progresses in a series of short scenes that have the shape and rhythms of sketches on “Saturday Night Live” rather than those of a traditional play. (Most are followed by quick blackouts.) And while the Joneses — all four of them — have all the aspects of normal folks, as their names would suggest, they also possess an uncanny otherness expressed through their stylized, disordered way of communicating.
But for all Mr. Eno’s quirks, his words cut to the heart of how we muddle through the worst life can bring. As Jennifer says to John, recalling a seriously strange encounter they had in the grocery store: “You were funny and weird, and you made me feel better. And I remembered people can do that. That talking with someone can make you feel better.”
So can eavesdropping on people talking, which is what you might call the theater. For all the sadness woven into its fabric, “The Realistic Joneses” brought me a pleasurable rush virtually unmatched by anything I’ve seen this season.
The Realistic Joneses
By Will Eno; directed by Sam Gold; sets by David Zinn; costumes by Kaye Voyce; lighting by Mark Barton; sound by Leon Rothenberg; technical supervision by Hudson Theatrical Associates; production stage manager, Jill Cordle; general manager, Bespoke Theatricals; associate producers, Michael Crea and P J Miller. Presented by Jeffrey Richards, Jerry Frankel, Jam Theatricals, Stacey Mindich, Susan Gallin, Mary Lu Roffe, Andy Sandberg, Scott M. Delman, William Berlind, Caiola Productions, CandyWendyJamie Productions, Amy Danis and Mark Johannes, Finn Moellenberg Productions, Angelina Fiordellisi, Jay Franke, Gesso Productions, Grimaldi Astrachan Hello Entertainment, Meg Herman, Mara Smigel Rutter Productions, KM-R&D and Will Trice, in association with Yale Repertory Theater; James Bundy, artistic director; Victoria Nolan, managing director. At the Lyceum Theater, 149 West 49th Street, Manhattan; 212-239-6200, telecharge.com. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
WITH: Toni Collette (Jennifer Jones), Michael C. Hall (John Jones), Tracy Letts (Bob Jones) and Marisa Tomei (Pony Jones).
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April 4, 2014
Stand Up, They’re Rocking the Boat, Like 1950 Again ‘Guys and Dolls’ Is Performed as a Benefit for Carnegie Hall
By Anthony Tommasini
For most people, the term fugue evokes a very sober, complex form of contrapuntal instrumental music. But then there is the “Fugue for Tinhorns,” the song that opens the classic 1950 musical “Guys and Dolls,” in which three small-time gamblers in New York argue over their picks to win a big horse race. Here was the great composer and lyricist Frank Loesser wresting the fugue form from classical music and turning it into a charming, clever, but no less musically ingenious opener for a show about some lovable denizens of the New York underworld, as vivid as ever in the brilliant book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. And what better setting for that song, and Loesser’s inspired score, than Carnegie Hall, which on Thursday night hosted an exhilarating, one-time-only, ready-for-Broadway performance of “Guys and Dolls,” with Rob Fisher conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, no less.
The evening, a benefit for Carnegie Hall, featured an all-star cast, headed by Nathan Lane at his hearty- voiced and double-take comedic best, portraying the manic, perpetually nervous gambler Nathan Detroit, who runs “the oldest established permanent floating crap game in New York.” Mr. Lane was reprising a role that made him a star in the acclaimed 1992 Broadway production. Patrick Wilson brought his robust voice and dashing looks to the role of Sky Masterson, a legend among the gamblers, a smooth operator willing to stake almost anything on a bet. Sierra Boggess was endearing as Sarah Brown, a sergeant in the Save-a-Soul Mission, singing with gleaming, operatic confidence when we first meet her, but revealing inner yearnings as she finds herself inexplicably falling for Sky.
The right Miss Adelaide, the nightclub singer who has been exasperatingly engaged to Nathan for 14 years, can walk away with “Guys and Dolls,” which is precisely what the amazing Megan Mullally did here. Her “Adelaide’s Lament,” in which this model of patience realizes that her chronic cold may be a psychosomatic reaction to the endless delay of her wedding day, was a beguiling mix of tenderness and twangy Brooklynese. But now and then, Ms. Mullally (who is soon to open in the play “Annapurna,” Off Broadway) welled with a fleeting moment of vocal and emotional intensity that revealed her character’s genuine inner longing.
Directed by the veteran Jack O’Brien and using the original orchestrations, this performance was a de facto staged production, with colorful period costumes, video images projected on the rear wall of the stage and exciting dance routines, especially the kinetic Crapshooters Dance, featuring eight acrobatic men in a routine choreographed by Joshua Bergasse. Devotion to Carnegie Hall clearly runs deep among theater people because these superb cast members, including impressive artists in all the secondary roles, had been rehearsing since March 24 for this one-night benefit.
The galvanic John Treacy Egan was Nicely-Nicely Johnson, joined in that opening “Fugue for Tinhorns” by the impish Christopher Fitzgerald and the delightful Colman Domingo. Lee Wilkof and John Bolton were other standouts. Steve Schirripa, best known as the hulking Bobby Bacala from “The Sopranos,” was a comically impervious Big Jule. The veteran Judy Kaye made a wonderfully officious Gen. Matilda B. Cartwright, who arrives intending to close down Sarah’s languishing mission in New York.
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It was especially moving to see the great, ageless Len Cariou as Arvide Abernathy, the wise elder at the mission, and Sarah’s grandfather. Mr. Cariou gave a moving account of “More I Cannot Wish You,” when, to Sarah’s surprise, he urged her to follow her feelings for Sky and find joy.
If the archival recording of this performance turns out well, it should be released. And message to Broadway: Come up with a musical for Ms. Mullally now.
Correction: April 7, 2014 Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to Megan Mullally and the play “Annapurna.” She is rehearsing the play, not in previews of it. Previews are scheduled to begin April 13.
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April 7, 2014
Mickey Rooney, Master of Putting On a Show, Dies at 93 By Aljean Harmetz
Mickey Rooney, the exuberant entertainer who led a roller-coaster life — the world’s top box-office star at 19 as the irrepressible Andy Hardy, a bankrupt has-been in his 40s, a comeback kid on Broadway as he neared 60 — died on Sunday. He was 93 and lived in Westlake Village, Calif.
His death was confirmed by his son Michael Joseph Rooney.
He stood only a few inches taller than five feet, but Mr. Rooney was larger and louder than life. From the moment he toddled onto a burlesque stage at 17 months to his movie debut at 6 to his career-crowning Broadway debut in “Sugar Babies” at 59 and beyond, he did it all. He could act, sing, dance, play piano and drums, and before he was out of short pants he could cry on cue.
As Andy Hardy, growing up in the idealized fictional town of Carvel, Mr. Rooney was the most famous teenager in America from 1937 to 1944: everybody’s cheeky son or younger brother, energetic and feverishly in love with girls and cars. The 15 Hardy Family movies, in which all problems could be solved by Andy’s man-to-man talks with his father, Judge Hardy (played by Lewis Stone), earned more than $75 million — a huge sum during the Depression years, when movie tickets rarely cost more than 25 cents.
In 1939, America’s theater owners voted Mr. Rooney the No. 1 box-office star, over Tyrone Power. That same year he sang and danced his way to an Oscar nomination for best actor in “Babes in Arms,” the first of the “Hey kids, let’s put on a show” MGM musicals he made with Judy Garland.
He was box-office king again in 1940, over Spencer Tracy, and in 1941, with Clark Gable taking second place. Three years earlier, in The New York Times, Frank S. Nugent had written of Mr. Rooney’s performance as the swaggering bully redeemed by Tracy’s Father Flanagan in “Boys Town”:
“Mickey is the Dead End gang rolled into one. He’s Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart and King Kong before they grew up, or knew a restraining hand. Mickey, as the French would understate it, is the original enfant terrible.”
Mr. Rooney’s personal life was as dynamic as his screen presence. He married eight times. He earned $12 million before he was 40 and spent more. Impulsive, recklessly extravagant, mercurial and addicted to playing the ponies and shooting craps, he attacked life as though it were a six-course dinner.
Movie audiences first saw him as Mickey McGuire, a tough kid in a battered derby hat, in a series of two- reel shorts based on the comic strip “Toonerville Trolley.” (The first short in which he had a starring role, “Mickey’s Circus,” was thought to be lost, but a print was found, along with many other silent films, in the Netherlands in 2014.)
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At 13, he auditioned for the role of the mischievous sprite Puck in the great Austrian producer-director Max Reinhardt’s 1934 Hollywood Bowl production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Though unfamiliar with Shakespeare, Mr. Rooney impressed Reinhardt, who cast him in the play and — along with James Cagney, Dick Powell and Olivia de Havilland — in the movie version he directed with William Dieterle a year later.
He was a sensation. “Rooney seems inhuman, he moves like mist or water, his body is burnished by the extraordinary light, and his gurgling laugh is ghostly and enchanting,” David Thomson wrote of Mr. Rooney’s performance in his “Biographical Dictionary of Film.” “Could such a performance have been directed? Rooney’s Puck is truly inhuman, one of cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic.”
Between 1936 and 1944, Mr. Rooney made more than three dozen movies. Under contract at MGM, he brought vitality even to bit parts like a Brooklyn shoeshine boy in “Little Lord Fauntleroy” (1936), the kid brother in the film version of Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!” (1935) and a young deckhand on a fishing boat in “Captains Courageous” (1937).
Along with Deanna Durbin, Mr. Rooney was given a special Academy Award in 1939 “for bringing to the screen the spirit and personification of youth.” The next year he received his Oscar nomination for “Babes in Arms.” His second nomination was for his performance in the film version of William Saroyan’s “Human Comedy” (1943) as the messenger boy who delivers telegrams from the War Department telling families in a small California town that their sons have died. That movie seems saccharine and preachy more than 70 years later, but time has not tarnished the desolation on Mr. Rooney’s face when he reads those telegrams.
A Career of Ups and Downs
Although his career was one of the longest in show business history — about 90 years separated his first movie from his last — it was crammed with detours and dead ends. (“There have been crevices, fissures, pits, and I’ve fallen into a lot of them,” he told The Times in 1979.)
His elfin face and short, stocky body were part of the problem: At 28, with adolescent roles no longer an option and adult roles hard to come by, he said he would give 10 years of his life to be six inches taller. Yet most of his wounds were self-inflicted.
He married in haste — he wed Miss Birmingham of 1944 after knowing her for less than two weeks — and repented in haste. He turned his back on MGM, the studio that had made him a star, for the mirage of running his own production company, and ended up mired in debt and B movies. Suits for alimony, child support and back taxes pursued him like tin cans tied to the bumper of the car he was driving to his next wedding.
When he needed money most desperately, he could always play Las Vegas. “I was a smash hit at the Riviera, where I drew $17,500 a week and lost twice that on the crap table,” Mr. Rooney wrote in his 1991 autobiography, “Life Is Too Short.”
At one point in 1950, the only job he could get was touring Southern states with the Hadacol Caravan. Admission to the shows was a box top from a bottle of a 26 percent alcohol tonic that the government soon forced off the market. NY Times
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Yet he always bounced back, often higher than anyone expected.
Not including the Mickey Maguire shorts, Mr. Rooney made more than 200 movies, earning a total of four Academy Award nominations — he was nominated for best supporting actor as the fast-talking soldier who dies trying to protect $30,000 he won in a craps game in “The Bold and the Brave” (1956) and as the trainer of a wild Arabian horse in “The Black Stallion” (1979). (Because of his size, Mr. Rooney played a lot of jockeys and, as his waistline expanded, former jockeys who had become trainers. He was the vagabond who helps Elizabeth Taylor turn an unruly horse into a steeplechase champion in her breakthrough film, “National Velvet,” in 1944.)
He was also nominated for five Emmy Awards and won one, for his performance in the 1981 television movie “Bill” as a developmentally disabled man who has spent most of his life in an institution and must learn to live in the outside world.
An Early Start
Mickey Rooney was born Joseph Yule Jr. in a Brooklyn tenement on Sept. 23, 1920. His mother, Nell Carter, danced in a burlesque chorus line. His father was a top banana, a lead comic, but only on second- rate circuits.
Sonny Yule, as he was known, grew up in boardinghouses in a dozen towns, but he lived backstage and, before he was 2 years old, onstage. His parents separated when he was 4, each of them taking $20 of the $40 they had saved.
For a year he had a normal childhood with his mother in Kansas City, Mo. Then she read in Variety that Hal Roach was looking for children for his Our Gang comedies. A few weeks later, the two of them left for Hollywood.
His mother turned down an offer from Roach’s assistant to try Sonny out at $5 a day. In vaudeville, one always waited for a better offer. But no second offer came. There were too many mothers eager for $5 a day.
It was back to Kansas City and then back again to Hollywood. Sonny got a job in a musical revue for $50 a week. “Marvelous for a five-year-old,” wrote the Los Angeles Times theater critic. A few months later he was Mickey McGuire at $250 for each “Toonerville Trolley” short. His professional name was changed to Mickey McGuire until the creator of the comic strip objected. But he kept the Mickey.
Nobody ever doubted his talent. Of his “all but unimprovable” performance in “National Velvet,” James Agee wrote, “He is an extremely wise and moving actor, and if I am ever again tempted to speak disrespectfully of him, that will be in anger over the unforgivable waste of a forceful yet subtle talent, proved capable of self-discipline and of the hardest roles that could be thrown it.”
In “Little Lord Fauntleroy,” “Captains Courageous” and “The Devil Is a Sissy” (1936), Mr. Rooney was a foil to MGM’s $2,500-a-week child star, Freddie Bartholomew. Decades after seeing “The Devil Is a Sissy,” the critic Walter Kerr remembered “a brief but instantly shocking moment.” Fifteen-year-old NY Times
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Mickey played a street urchin whose father was to be electrocuted that night. “Without warning, the street lights dimmed, just for a second or two,” Mr. Kerr wrote in The Times in 1979. “As Mr. Rooney glanced upward, the swift and silent realization, the ashen pain, that washed over his face and then was as hastily self-consciously erased was — most literally — staggering.”
By “Lord Jeff” (1938) Mr. Rooney and Mr. Bartholomew, playing delinquents in a naval reform school, had equal billing. In the last of their five movies together, “A Yank at Eton” (1942), Mr. Rooney was the star.
But MGM’s cleverest use of Mr. Rooney was teaming him with Judy Garland. His enormous energy and her voice and vulnerability melted the screen in four musicals. That the plots were more or less the same did not matter. In “Babes in Arms,” they put on a show to raise money for their out-of-work parents. In “Strike Up the Band” (1940), they raised money for a high school band contest. In “Babes on Broadway” (1941), they wanted to send orphans on an excursion to the country. And in “Girl Crazy” (1943), the money their Wild West Rodeo raised saved their college. What really mattered were Mickey’s brash charm, Judy’s sincerity and the songs by the Gershwin brothers, Rodgers and Hart, and others.
They were also teamed in three of the Andy Hardy movies and — before either of them was famous — in “Thoroughbreds Don’t Cry” (1937), as a jockey who is tricked into throwing a race and the girl who tries to help him.
Running to the Altar
Mr. Rooney was 21 when he married the 19-year-old starlet Ava Gardner in 1942. The studio fought the marriage and was equally upset at Mr. Rooney’s divorce a year later.
This was just the first chapter in what would be a long and tumultuous marital history. Mr. Rooney was divorced six times, and the divorce petitions all had similar complaints: He had a fiery temper, and he would leave home for days or even weeks at a time.
Drafted into the Army in 1944, Mr. Rooney met Betty Jane Rase, an Alabama beauty queen, at a party. “Sometime after the seventh bourbon or maybe the seventeenth,” Mr. Rooney wrote in “Life Is Too Short,” “I asked Miss Birmingham if she’d like to become Mrs. Mickey Rooney, and she said yes.”
They divorced in 1949. His third marriage, to the actress Martha Vickers, who had played Lauren Bacall’s nymphomaniac sister in “The Big Sleep,” lasted three years. His fourth wife was another beauty queen, Elaine Mahnken, who later recalled, “While they were dunning him for bills, he’d be out buying two new Jaguars.” She handled the finances and brought Mr. Rooney to the brink of solvency. He rewarded her by going to Las Vegas and losing $50,000.
His fifth marriage, to Barbara Thomason, an aspiring actress, ended tragically. When Mr. Rooney declared bankruptcy in 1962, soon after the birth of their third child, he had $500 in cash and almost $500,000 in debts, and he owed $100,000 in delinquent taxes. The I.R.S. gave him an allowance of $200 a month, so he borrowed money to play the ponies. A month after they separated in December 1965 and began a messy custody battle, Barbara Thomason Rooney was shot to death by a jealous lover, Milos Milosevic, who then used the same gun to kill himself. NY Times
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By then, Mr. Rooney’s career was at low tide. As he grew older and wider, the pugnacious cockiness that had been charming when Andy Hardy sipped sodas with Judy Garland, Lana Turner, Ann Rutherford or Esther Williams in the Carvel drugstore seemed rancid. He drank too much and was addicted to sleeping pills. In December 1959, after he had apparently had a few drinks too many, Mr. Rooney made a fool of himself on “The Tonight Show”; the audience applauded when the host, Jack Paar, asked him to leave.
He could still be an electrifying actor, and often was, especially on television. He inherited the title role in “The Comedian,” written by Rod Serling, on “Playhouse 90” in 1957 because a half-dozen other actors had refused to play a lecherous, vicious and greedy comedian. The role won him his first Emmy nomination.
But he took virtually every part he was offered in those years, and he was most often seen mugging his way through bad movies. He replaced Donald O’Connor in the last of a series about a talking mule, “Frances in the Haunted House” (1956). In “Everything’s Ducky” (1961), one of his co-stars was a talking duck. In “The Private Lives of Adam and Eve” (1960), a low-budget oddity for which he shared director credit with Albert Zugsmith, he played the Devil in an extended dream sequence. He was a manic advertising executive in search of sex symbols in “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini” (1965), a beach-party movie of which The Times critic Howard Thompson observed that anybody expecting the worst would not be disappointed.
The Spotlight Returns
Things began turning around for Mr. Rooney in the 1970s. He stopped drinking and became a born-again Christian. In 1978, after two more marriages and divorces, he married Jan Chamberlin, a country singer whom he met through his son Mickey Jr. Their marriage, his eighth and last, brought stability to his life. And a return to stardom was just around the corner.
It took a year to put together the boisterous and proudly old-fashioned burlesque-style revue “Sugar Babies,” in which Mr. Rooney’s co-star was the former MGM hoofer Ann Miller. Mr. Rooney fought over every skit and argued over every song and almost always got things done his way. The show opened on Broadway on Oct. 8, 1979, to rapturous reviews, and this time he did not throw success away.
“Sugar Babies” ran for three years. A road company with Carol Channing and Robert Morse was not a success — audiences wanted only one top banana, Mickey Rooney — so he spent four more years on the road with the show.
In 1983, Mr. Rooney was given an honorary Academy Award “in recognition of his 60 years of versatility in a variety of film performances.”
He continued performing well into the new millennium. He had roles in “Night at the Museum” (2006), “The Muppets” (2011) and other movies. In 2007 he and Ms. Chamberlin began touring in a “one man, one wife” show with the nostalgic title “Let’s Put On a Show.” As late as 2014 he was still making movies.
In Mr. Rooney’s later years, his life became tumultuous once again. In 2011 he obtained a restraining order against his stepson Christopher Aber and Mr. Aber’s wife, Christina, charging them with withholding food and medicine and forcing him to sign over his assets. He repeated his allegations in Washington before the
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Senate Special Committee on Aging. He later filed suit against them; the suit was settled in 2013, with the Abers agreeing that they owed Mr. Rooney $2.8 million.
Mr. Rooney is survived by Ms. Chamberlin.
For all the ups and downs of Mr. Rooney’s life and career, there was one constant: his love of performing. “Growing up in vaudeville,” he once said, “made me cognizant of the need to have fun at what you’re doing. You can’t get it done well without it being fun. And I’ve never felt that what I do is ‘work.’ ”
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