Bette Midler, Back on Broadway

[joeybee12]

“It’s all about the bosom,” Bette Midler says as she slinks down in an armchair, arches her back and steadies her breasts until they are horizontal enough to balance an ashtray.

This isn’t a sight gag from her Divine Miss M days. It’s how the Hollywood superagent Sue Mengers sometimes smoked on her living room sofa, a cigarette in one hand and a joint in the other, as she dispensed wit and wisdom like the Cheshire cat to movie stars who dropped in. So sedentary was Mengers that when the ashtray was full, she had the housekeeper place a clean one on her chest.

“Sue even had a friend blowing marijuana smoke into her face as she passed away,” Ms. Midler said of Mengers, who died in 2011, by then a legend in film circles for her brazen ways and starry dinner parties. “She was high until the bitter end.”

Or so the story goes — one of many that Ms. Midler collected here this winter as she prepared to play Mengers in her first role on Broadway in some 40 years, in John Logan’s new one-woman comedy, “I’ll Eat You Last,” now in preview performances. In conversations with Ali MacGraw, David Geffen and other friends of Mengers’s Ms. Midler zeroed in on body language to help with her chief challenge: holding the audience’s interest with an 80-minute monologue delivered from a couch. Such research is rare for Ms. Midler, but it reflects her own perfectionist anxieties — her earliest dream was to become a Broadway star — as well as a new resolve.

http://theater.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/theater/bette-midler-back-on-broadway-in-ill-eat-you-last.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

[William769]

1. I love her!

I remember when they first opened Epcot at Disney World they had a 3D show starring her.

I have loved her I think even before I figured out I was Gay.

[joeybee12]

2. Same here...thought she was great since way back when! nt

[xchrom]

3. Perfect! Nt

[Bluenorthwest]

4. Midler will be delicious as Sue Mengers, I wish I was already ticketed

It takes a talent like Bette to even think about playing a character like Sue.

[MuseRider]

5. I would sell several prized possessions

for the chance to get to NYC to see this. *sigh* Sadly that will not work at this time. I would hope they would film it.

I wish they would do shows like they do the Opera at the movie theaters. There are always one or two I would die to see. Where I live we get the 70th cast group with no sets and call it a show. Rehearsal groups of rehearsal groups of rehearsal groups. Shit, they can't even sit their horses at the big fancy horse shows.

Sorry, this made me happy and so sad at the same time.

Someone who sees this should report on it for us. What a wonderful time this will be.