March
30
Fonda Scores in Broadway's 33 Variations
When I interviewed Jane Fonda for More Magazine last year I was stunned that this vital, canny and beautiful actress --even after the commercial hit Monster-in-Law--was not getting movie offers. Her autobiography My Life So Far is a best-seller and the strong-minded political activist still commands massive fees to speak on the lecture circuit. Luckily, even if moviemakers are still focused on the younger demo, Broadway isn't. The theatre has always welcomed mature movie stars, from Lauren Bacall to Glenn Close. So 46 years since she last trod the boards, the 71-year-old Fonda is back on Broadway, earning raves for her role in Moises Kaufman's 33 Variations, where she projects to the balcony through eight shows a week. Take that, Jeremy Piven.
Fonda carries the Amadeus-like 33 Variations, which compares two composers, one famous and one not, and parallels two people in different time periods fighting against the dying of the light. An ailing musicologist (Fonda) feels compelled to travel to a Bonn archive to figure out why at the end of his life, Beethoven (Zach Grenier) composed 33 variations on a waltz by a minor composer. Even though she is declining fast from Lou Gehrig's disease, the obsessive researcher refuses to come home. Eventually her costume designer daughter (Samantha Mathis) and nurse boyfriend (Colin Hanks) insist on coming to Germany to attend to her.
The play shifts back and forth in time to show the ill and increasingly deaf Beethoven’s obsession with finding every possible variation on the waltz. We hear the variations, performed live on piano. The play works, thanks to the radiant Fonda, who starts out strong, confident, and insistent on solving the Beethoven mystery, even as she faces her body’s disintegration. As she gets weaker, she is forced to become more intimate with her daughter. Mathis and Hanks, making his Broadway debut, are also fine.
Susan Sarandon is currently starring on Broadway too, in Exit the King, opposite Geoffrey Rush.
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