The leap from screen to stage

A decade later, another Mrs. Tom Cruise (the third) is making her Broadway debut. That’s Katie Holmes, whose supporting role in the revival of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (also starring John Lithgow, Dianne Wiest and Patrick Wilson, scheduled to open on October 16 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater) is modest compared with the five lustful characters embodied by Kidman in The Blue Room. But Holmes (who also appeared as The Girl in a Batman movie) is probably hoping that at least some of the career-rejuvenating fairy dust Broadway sprinkled on Kidman will fall upon her, too. Broadway, it seems, has eclipsed Playboy as the place to make Hollywood pay attention.

Another familiar movie face, Kristin Scott Thomas, seems right at home in Ian Rickson’s production of Chekhov’s Seagull (to open on October 1 at the Walter Kerr). Scott Thomas, known for looking enigmatic and patrician in films like The English Patient, has already proved her classic stage mettle in London with arresting turns in Chekhov (The Three Sisters as well as The Seagull) and Pirandello (As You Desire Me).

I am not nervous about the first Broadway outings of Scott Thomas, Sarsgaard or, for that matter, Jeremy Piven, who will be appearing as a foulmouthed studio executive in a revival of David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow (to open on October 23 at the Ethel Barrymore). No, the Hollywood celebrity I’m really worried about is that big green lug named Shrek, the animated movie hero who will be trying to effect the transition from two to three dimensions (and from speech to song) when he appears in the eponymously titled musical scheduled to open on December 14 at the Broadway Theater, to be channelled by the fine flesh-and-blood actor Brian d’Arcy James.
_BEN BRANTLEY,NYT