Kid, You're Gonna Come Back a Star!

By Richard Zoglin

The businessmen of Broadway know one way to create a hit: hire a big Hollywood star and hope the name on the marquee will pull in the crowds. The romanticists of Broadway prefer another, more storied method: take a kid from the chorus, stick him or her into the lead role and watch as a new star is born. Sometimes this Broadway fable even comes true. Oddly, it did so twice last week.

The first instance was when Henry Goodman, the British actor named last month to replace Nathan Lane as star of the hit musical The Producers, was suddenly fired. Not funny enough, the (small p) producers had ruled. For the new Max Bialystock, they tapped Brad Oscar, Lane's longtime understudy in the part. Oscar won a Tony nomination in the role of Franz, the Nazi author of Springtime for Hitler--a role he stepped into in Chicago when the original actor was sidelined by knee surgery. Oscar told a reporter last week, "I still can't believe it's my life."

Sutton Foster was just an understudy too when the musical Thoroughly Modern Millie was preparing its pre-Broadway run last year in La Jolla, Calif. But the leading lady got dumped, and Foster, at the last minute, was thrust into the role. Last week the show opened on Broadway, and Foster was basking in the limelight. As the small-town girl who comes to New York City in the 1920s, she's got the full package: girlish gawkiness and Broadway brass, the legs and the lungs. Foster is a big reason the show is just about the cutest thing to hit Broadway since Annie's dimples, with perkily retro songs by Jeanine Tesori and clever staging by director Michael Mayer, who has removed some of the silliness from the rather bizarre 1967 movie. All that and choreographer Rob Ashford's well-drilled corps of tapping chorus girls and guys. Look closely; there might be a star in there. --By Richard Zoglin