Paul Gross, who will make his Broadway debut starring opposite Kim Cattrall in Noël Coward’s Private Lives, is profiled in The New York Times this Sunday, November 6. Private Lives begins performances that day at 3 PM at The Music Box Theatre (239 West 45th Street). Directed by Sir Richard Eyre, Private Lives opens Thursday, November 17 following sold-out runs in London and Toronto.
The New York Times
THE MOUNTIE PUTS ON HIS TUXEDO
PAUL GROSS JOINS KIM CATTRALL IN ‘PRIVATE LIVES’
By Sarah Lyall
November 6, 2011
THE phone call to Paul Gross came out of the blue. Mr. Gross, one of Canada’s best-known actors, had not appeared onstage for a decade, since playing Hamlet in a production at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival in Ontario, but there on the line was Richard Eyre, the distinguished former director of the National Theater in London, offering him a part in a revival of Noël Coward’s “Private Lives.”
“I imagine you have some reservations, so I will just go ahead and pre-empt them and tell you what I think they are,” Mr. Eyre was saying.
Perhaps the most pressing on Mr. Eyre’s list was the play itself, said Mr. Gross, a tall and hunky 52-year-old who may be best known to Americans for his role as the charmingly maddening artistic director of a struggling theater festival in “Slings & Arrows,” the Canadian cult television series. “Private Lives,” written in 1930, is a perennially revived comedy of manners which, if done badly, can seem all surface and no substance, a pastiche from a bygone fantasy world of gin-soaked bon mots and dated sexual confusion.
But Mr. Gross has become a convert (not that he really needed that much convincing). “Though it’s indelibly camp, underneath it’s an extremely funny, well made, perfectly structured play,” he said here recently over coffee and pain au chocolat before the day’s rehearsal. “There are a lot of acute and incisive observations about sexual attraction and relationships and the slightly darker undercurrents at work.”
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