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Lauren
Bacall (b. 1924) made her Broadway debut in a melodrama
entitled Johnny 2 x 4 (1942), under the name Betty
Bacall, returning to do non-musical comedies such as Goodbye, Charlie
(1959) and Cactus Flower (1965) after her initial Hollywood
success and marriage to Humphrey Bogart. Despite her inexperience as
a singer, she landed the lead in Ron Field's production of Applause (1970),
an up-dated musical version of the classic film All About Eve by Charles
Strouse, Lee Adams, and Betty Comdon and Adolf Green, winning a Tony Award
for Best Actress in a Musical. She returned to Hollywood, only to
come back to Broadway over a decade later, this time winning a Tony Award
for her performance as Tess Harding in Kander & Ebb's Woman of the
Year (1981), based on the Tracey-Hepburn
film comedy of the same name. She and Marilyn Cooper stopped the
show nightly when they sang the hilarious duet "The Grass is Always
Greener" late in the second act. More than a decade later,
Bacall bounced "back to Broadway" yet again, this time in
Michael Langham's production of Noël Coward's Waiting in the
Wings (1999), as "revisited" by Jeremy Sams. |
