12/16/2009 4:30 pm
Culture
Mary Wells: An Evening With Cate Blanchett … Onstage and Off
Our Mary takes a close-up look at Cate as Blanche duBois onstage and Cate – in a dinner conversation – offstage.
© Derek Henderson
As almost everybody knows by now, Cate Blanchett is wowing the world as Blanche in Tennessee Williams’s "A Streetcar Named Desire" and is now also at BAM, in Brooklyn at the Harvey Theater. The words used to describe her performance are over the top so I was very excited to be invited to a small dinner in her honor.
It was a delicious invitation for many reasons. Alan Fishman, BAM chairman of the board, and his wife Judy, are good friends and know a lot about what is what in the theater at any moment. And the host and hostess of the dinner were Bill Campbell, vice chairman of Bam, and his wife Christine Wachter-Campbell. Bill was one of my most talented clients at my advertising agency – my memories of collaborating with him are a book I should write. He has just completed renovating one of New York’s luxe minimalist apartments – all open air and stunning sculpture – just in time to celebrate Cate Blanchett. So I knew it would be a wOw of an evening.
There were icy roads all over New York Sunday and Cate’s afternoon performance was pushed off – as was the dinner. The performance ended late so she arrived straight from the theater with her face scrubbed, in flat little shoes, running pants and a tee shirt. She looked 12. She looked gorgeous. People who had seen her performance told me that she had many curtain calls and during the first one, at the close of that hysterical, almost athletic performance, she looked like an old, sick woman. At the second curtain call she looked 45 years old. At the final curtain call she looked like Cate Blanchett. Great actresses can do that.
What tickled me most was that as Cate and her husband, Andrew Upton, have become co-artistic directors of the Sydney Theater Company in Australia, she is not only their big draw for theatergoers, she and her husband are also the chief money raisers and support earners for that theater. It is not largely government supported. So Cate goes around doing a lot of what we do at wOw, raising money to make great theater and great wOw.
She stood there, a beauty, in her little flat shoes with her rosy cheeks and perfect soap-scrubbed skin and her dancing eyes and gave a group of BAM supporters a rousing explanation of her theater group in Sidney, the kinds of theater they will produce, what makes them special and the huge support that BAM has been giving them. She did what we all do at one time or another: She sold her company. She stood there after that killing performance doing what we have all been doing for wOw for two years, and she did it cheerfully. She connected her theater with BAM in a detailed way that made the connection highly important to us all.
If she was tired she kept it to herself. She didn’t come to dinner to eat. She came to deepen Bam’s support. And she did that. You could see it on all the faces of the BAM supporters at the dinner. She is on her way to tour the United States and Australia with "Streetcar" and at the end of the tour I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t re-excited areas of the world that are in a funk right now. I am such a fan since that evening. She re-excited me. I want to buy her shoes. They have spirit in them. I hope you are all seeing Cate Blanchett in one of the greatest dramatic roles of all time. You will get the meaningful lift I got and right now we can all use one of those.
Photographs by Lisa Tomasetti/Courtesy of BAM
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You failed to mention Liv Ulman who is the director of this production. It is quite a feather in her cap. Cate is one of those actors, like Streep, who can play almost any character and do it extraordinarily well. She and Ulman were on Rose last week–––interesting conversation.
P.S. finally got to see Julia & Julie ––loved it, and wanted to give high fives–—maybe high tens to Joan Buck for a stunning performance. Did she have idea she could act like that?
Cate was born to play in this role! Bravo!
There are many aspects to the WoW site that I like, many that set it apart from other websites of this ilk. However the one aspect of this site that I really don’t like is the reporting on events and plays taking place in New York.
Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy reading about actors, actresses, politicians and other notables doing what they do in New York. However for someone like myself that loves the theater, fundraisers and galas, it is just another reminder that I am stuck in a hick town….miles away from the events I would so love to attend.
Thank you Mary Wells for a moving recollection of the dinner party at which Cate Blanchett was the honoree.
Of all the female characters created by playwright Tennessee Williams the most tragic and poignant, in my opinion, is that of Blanche Dubois. The Vivian Leigh performance was magnificent and I’ve read articles from others who witnessed Jessica Tandy (the first Blanche) and said that she was even better. Cate joins a stellar group.
I do wish that the PBS network had not cancelled the American Playhouse program. It would be marvelous to see Cate’s performance immortalized where, sadly, Ms. Tandy’s performance was not.
Cate Blanchett is another great actress who proves she really cares about acting and is more than a movie star. Catherine Zeta-Jones would be the other also currently on Broadway. Both are still in their prime and could be making movies instead.
Broadway is hard: six evenings a week, one matinee and pays a lot less! That’s dedication to acting!