A Pair of Jokers

By Lev Grossman

It's Sunday night backstage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on Broadway. Nathan Lane is sprawled on a couch in his tiny sitting room. His face is flushed. He looks exhausted. And no wonder: two days from now, he and Matthew Broderick are set to start previews of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple, the play's first revival in 40 years. Broderick and Lane, whose singularly fizzy chemistry made the musical The Producers a colossal hit in 2001, have been rehearsing nonstop for the past three weeks. Lane will play the slovenly Oscar Madison, Broderick the famously fastidious Felix Unger. The entire run is already sold out; the advance box office is $21.5 million, more than any other play in the history of Broadway.

But Lane isn't just exhausted. Last night, in the grand old tradition of pre-opening theatrical disasters, he accidentally slammed his right index finger in a door and wound up in the hospital with a fracture, 14 stitches and a prescription for Vicodin. His finger is splinted and swathed in a huge white bandage.

Enter Broderick. He goggles at the wounded finger.

BRODERICK: I can't act with that.

LANE: For the show they're gonna get ...

BRODERICK: [Finishing Lane's sentence] ... what, one of those rubber green ones?

LANE: One of those green things. Like at ballparks. [He holds up his bandaged digit like a foam hand.] I'm No. 1! Oscar, he's a very positive character this time around.

BRODERICK: So does that thing come off on Tuesday?

LANE: Well, yeah. I'm not going to wear this in the show. Have you met my finger puppet Melvin? [Making the finger talk to Broderick] Hi! Hi, Matthew! [Aside] That's just a little of the magical chemistry you've heard so much about ...

Indeed. Almost more famous than either Broderick or Lane is the legendary rapport between them, and when you meet them you can see why. Chemistry between actors is an unpredictable thing, a will-o'-the-wisp, elusive and ineffable, but in the case of Broderick and Lane it's so palpably real and present you can practically smell it. They love each other, and they love performing with each other.

That unique rapport has made them the most bankable stars on Broadway. Separately, before The Producers, Broderick and Lane were both solid B-list performers: likable, reliable but limited. What they became together was something far more than the sum of their parts. With The Odd Couple, and the movie version of The Producers, which opens Dec. 16, they're going to see how far chemistry can take them.

BRODERICK: Is it, like, throbbing?

LANE: Yes, it's throbbing. And I mean that in the nicest possible way.

Rewind to 2000. Broderick had been gamely vamping his way through big-budget nonsuccesses (Godzilla, Inspector Gadget) while quietly surprising a few dozen moviegoers with skillful turns in low-budget indies (Election, You Can Count on Me). Lane had given what looked like, and should have been, a breakout performance opposite Robin Williams in The Birdcage in 1996. But no. "Nothing. I had two offers," says Lane, with a touch of pardonable bitterness. "One was, I was asked to play Mr. Magoo, which I turned down. The other was a film called Mousehunt. That was it." Nobody questioned his talent. They just couldn't figure out what to do with it. When The Producers came calling, it was hardly a sure thing. A screen-to-stage adaptation of a Mel Brooks comedy three decades old, it has no hit songs and very little in the way of witty dialogue. The plot is tinsel-thin: Max, a crooked Broadway producer, and his nerdy accountant Leo concoct a scheme to make millions off a show that's calculated to flop.

But when Broderick and Lane got together for a rehearsal, something unexpected happened. They made each other better. "It was very intimate," says Susan Stroman, who directed Lane and Broderick in The Producers both on Broadway and in the upcoming movie version. "I knew immediately, when Matthew said his first line, 'Mr. Bialystock, anybody here?'"

Brooks, who's producing the movie, is less restrained. "I had no idea," he says. "They're like the cobalt bomb! If you take two elements and you put them together, sometimes they generate something that is way beyond their individual strengths."

If you look closely, you can see what Broderick and Lane get from each other. Take Broderick: with his permanently boyish features, his bite-sized stature, his slightly adenoidal voice, he's the quintessence of the light comic actor. But Lane sees something else in him: a sly, versatile mimic, with stage smarts that won him a Tony the first time he ever set foot on Broadway (in Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs, when he was 21). He pushes Broderick to let that side of him show. "He's very spontaneous," Lane says of his co-star. "He's more improvisational than he gives himself credit for. I very often have forced him into it. I ask him questions as Marlon Brando, or as one of these characters that he does. He can really riff, once he gets into the character."

Lane doesn't let Broderick be reticent. He forces him out, keeps him from coasting on that effortless Ferris Bueller charm. "It's comfortable and at the same time not too comfortable," Broderick says. "It's very on-your-toes. He's very challenging onstage. It sounds like a boxing match--and it is, a little bit. There are elements of competitiveness, but it's the good kind. He's very agile. You have to pay attention."

BRODERICK: He's very present, and he forces you to be too. I hate to admit it, but we enjoy each other.

LANE: Why do you hate to admit it?

BRODERICK: [Embarrassed] Because it's gross to talk about it. I really do enjoy 20% of my time onstage. I'm usually at about 17%, 18%, but when I'm with Nathan, it's like 20%.

And it goes both ways. Where Broderick errs on the side of caution as a performer, Lane is all over the map, all manic emotion and naked vulnerability. That is true both onstage and off. Broderick is Mr. Stability, with a wife--Sex and the City actress Sarah Jessica Parker--and a soon-to-be-3-year-old son, but Lane's personal life is famously turbulent. His father was an alcoholic, and his mother suffered from mental illness. He has struggled to find a steady partner. There's a core of insecurity there. Talking about The Odd Couple's record advance ticket sales, Lane can only focus on his fear of the inevitable backlash.

Some of this angst spills over into Lane the actor. Watch him in The Birdcage: there's no denying his virtuosity, but he goes so big, and in so many directions at once, that his performance sometimes feels brittle and campy and nervous and look-at-me, as if he is running away from real emotion.

But with Broderick beside him, you get a more grounded, more confident Lane. Broderick calms Lane down, helps him laugh at himself a little. "There is just a certain comfort level with him that's unusual," Lane says. "One wouldn't let the other one, you know, fall or look silly. We're protective of each other." It takes some work to get the terminally modest Broderick to cop to his contribution. "There's some truth in that," he shrugs. "If he gets upset at rehearsal, I tend to sort of try to be the reasonable one. But I can be the one who goes crazy and loses his temper too," he adds hastily.

All those dynamics will be writ large when The Producers, which TIME saw in an exclusive screening, hits theaters. Stroman, in her debut as a film director, has given the play an extremely faithful adaptation. It's more Singin' in the Rain than Chicago: fast-paced, no darkness, no interior fantasy sequences, just gags a-go-go. "It's packed full of comedy," Stroman says. "It's a comedy musical more than it is a musical comedy." Much of the Broadway cast returns, although two key roles are taken over by movie stars: Will Ferrell as a neo-Nazi playwright, and Uma Thurman as a Swedish casting-couch cutie. (At 6-ft.-plus, both actors tower over their leading men: Broderick is 5 ft. 8 in., and he's the tall one.)

Of course, the big screen is a long way from Broadway. "Matthew has the advantage over Nathan," Brooks says. "He's done a lot more films. Nathan very carefully has to be on his toes to keep up with the nuances of Matthew's performance, because movies are very focused and very pointed. You don't do close-ups onstage." True, but with the cameras right in their faces, it's more obvious than ever how much fun Broderick and Lane are having. You can actually see the glances zapping back and forth in the climactic courtroom scene, and when Lane, in a moment of Brooksian metazaniness, compliments Broderick on his singing, you can sense them both, after however many hundreds of performances, desperately trying not to crack up. Like all the classic comedy duos, they draw energy from each other, forming a feedback loop that spins faster and faster--although they are both loath to make any comparisons with the legends of the business.

BRODERICK: I'd like to be, ah ...

LANE: Who? Dean Martin?

BRODERICK: [Singing] Bum bum bum ... [as an eerily accurate Martin] I'm playing golf, man. Don't call me now, I'm playing golf. [Lane is helpless with laughter. And possibly Vicodin.] We're not quite at that level perhaps.

LANE: Martin and Lewis, you know, they were like rock stars. We're just two actors.

BRODERICK: You could also compare us to Bob Hope and, ah ... [He cracks up.]

LANE: [Skeptically] And Bing Crosby?

BRODERICK: Yeah!

LANE: How? I don't think we're anything like them.

BRODERICK: [Singing again] Bum bum-a-dum, bum bum bum ...

LANE: You just keep doing that. You just did that as Dean Martin a minute ago.

BRODERICK: No, that was [as Martin again], Don't call me on the golf course, man. Leave me alone, Jerry.

You'd think they'd be sick of each other, but they actually hang out offstage too. "We've always been friends," Broderick says. "We've had little arguments, very brief moments of temper or whatever, but so little. During this rehearsal process, when we get our little hour-and-a-half break, we go somewhere and eat. And go out after." There are joint excursions to the Hamptons. They have a whole circle of friends in common, including Parker and Lane's steady boyfriend as well as Alias actor (and Broadway veteran) Victor Garber. "Nathan is as much a part of our extended family as life allows," says Parker, who calls her husband's partner Uncle Nathan around son James Wilkie. "That's a huge part of life in the theater, the time after the show. They're both far more social than I am." Parker also maintains that The Odd Couple has reversed their real-life personas. "Matthew is far more like Oscar than Felix."

That may be, but there's a sense in which The Odd Couple tells their story, the story of two men who make each other better. As Oscar, the horndog sportswriter with a beer gut and a backward baseball cap, Lane learns a little discipline--he literally cleans up his act. And when he stands over Felix, yelling at him, begging him to let himself go, to cut loose, that could just as easily be Lane pushing Broderick. Or to put it another way, just as the shyster Max gets Leo to say in The Producers, "There's a lot more to me than there is to me." --With reporting by Lina Lofaro and Carolina A. Miranda

With reporting by Lina Lofaro, Carolina A. Miranda