A Splendid Showdown!

Hello everyone, I'm Kate, the newest member of the Jennifer Ehle blog team. I'm a long-time fan, theatre buff, and perennial student. Please bear with me as I make my blogging debut.

Awards season is upon us! Normally, we have to sit back and await the decisions of others, but here is our chance to influence the outcome. Support The Coast of Utopia, Jennifer Ehle, and all of your other favorites by nominating them for Broadway.com's 8th Annual Audience Awards. Here's what they have to say:

[…] Nominate your favorites in each category and later vote for the winners of this annual prize ... Voting takes place through Thursday, May 10 at 11:59pm. We'll announce the nominees on Friday, May 11, at which point final voting will start. Be sure to check back and see if your favorites made the cut! […]

Broadway.com and Playbill.com have posted photos from the 2007 Drama Desk Nominee Reception. Martha Plimpton, who has been nomiated for Outstanding Featured Actress, was there representing The Coast of Utopia. The awards will be presented on May 20.

For those of you who haven't had your fill of reviews, there is much praise from Everett Evans of The Houston Chronicle, who recently ran the marathon. He singles out one scene in particular:

[…] The entire cast, in fact, is uniformly superb, but there is no more space for individual commendations — other than to praise Jennifer Ehle and Amy Irving's splendid showdown in a Paris garret in Shipwreck, Ehle at that point playing Herzen's wife Natalie, with Irving as Ogarev's estranged wife, Maria. […]

He also has this to say about the "all head and no heart" debate regarding Tom Stoppard's works:

[…] Stoppard has at times been accused of being too cerebral, abstruse and devilishly tricky. Yet for all its heady political and philosophical debate, Utopia is not the offputting tract some might fear. Because Stoppard stresses the humanity of his flawed, complicated (and yes, brainy) characters, the trilogy remains involving throughout … It's about human relationships, too: romances thwarted or enduring, betrayals real or imagined, parent-child relationships, the tragedy of three key figures doomed to an early death by consumption. Whether considering how societies evolve or pondering the meaning in the death of a child, Stoppard's people are passionate as they are intelligent. […]

Remember that Spiderman 3 starts today! Here is a cute interview at Relish Now! with the lovely Rosemary Harris, who recounts a potential disaster (that was thankfully averted) while filming part deux.

[...] “They had built four stories of the building, and I was standing on the window ledge,” she recalled. She was protected with a thin body-fitting harness (“It’s the same thing the Cirque du Soleil people wear,” she said) and wires that supported her … for the most part. “One time just before they were going to take a shot of me falling, they suddenly shouted out ‘Don’t jump yet! Your wires have lost their memory!’ It was alarming.” She isn’t sure exactly what a wire having lost its memory means, but waited for them to reprogram the computers that controlled the wires. “Then they said, ‘OK, now you can jump’ and I said, ‘Thanks a lot.’” She enjoyed her brief foray into stunt work. “I loved it. I got quite addicted to it. It was sort of an adrenaline rush.” [...]

Not only does she enjoy doing her own stunt work, she's quite the world traveler as well.

[...] “Rosemary Harris has been busy lately on a worldwide tour promoting Spider-Man 3, and she’s having a blast. "I’m ready for beer and skittles, raring to go," she said by phone from New York, just back from a trip to Tokyo and just before she jetted off to London, Paris, Berlin and Rome. "When you’re flying first class, it spoils you for anything else.… It’s red carpet all the way." [...]

Well, we're down to the wire. Only 11 performances remain, and the cast and crew will be running their final marathon tomorrow, May 5. Don't despair but remember, "Life's bounty is in its flow."