Dividing the Estate, by the late Horton Foote, tracks the disintegration of a family legacy, and is very much an ensemble work. But in the play’s 2007 Off Broadway production at Primary Stages as well as its Broadway transfer last year, Hallie Foote—the playwright’s daughter, and a premier interpreter of his work—emerged as first among equals in a very fine cast. For her superb efforts, she has been rewarded with a Tony nomination in the category of Best Featured Actress in a Play.

Time Out New York: On the page, your part in Dividing the Estate doesn’t seem as funny as you made it. Was it conceived that way?
Hallie Foote: The play had been done before, a long time ago in a regional theater. I saw it, and I don’t remember it being done like that. When I work on a part, sometimes I get an instinct about it—and I just had this instinct about Mary Jo. They actually wanted me to play the other sister, because they kind of think of me that way—I do parts like that. But there’s this other side of me. And a lot of the stuff that happened, we discovered in the rehearsal process—like the temper tantrums and all that stuff. That was all me. But it came out of the lines and the language and the situation, you know? And Michael [Wilson], my director, is terrific—he just let me go for it.

Did you get any input or guidance on the performance from your late father?
I sometimes would ask questions while we were in previews, just to make sure. One risk I run an actress is that my voice can get a little shrill sometimes—and he’d let me know if he thought it was. At one point I was pushing a little and he said, “Ya know, you’ve got to relax, and not do that.” So it was more technical stuff with my dad. Occasionally he thought I was going off in a wrong direction, but not so much with this play. I think he thought I pretty much understood the character and how everything worked.

The play had a lot of Chekhovian elements. and a fascinating blend of actors to bring out all of its tones.
Yeah, it did. Someone like Liz [Ashley]—every night, she’s there 100 percent. You could just see this matriarch that was pulling the strings and getting these kids to go ballistic. It was very, very interesting to see each actor pick a kind of character element and really work with it. And then we all sort of tied it into this ensemble piece. I think that worked really well.

Are you involved with Signature Theatre Company’s season-long production next year of your father’s nine-play The Orphans’ Home Cycle?
Yes. I’m going to be in it, My dad finished it just before he died. He was able to see the first six, which I was totally happy about. And I am really proud of it. I think it’s going to be quite wonderful.

Oh, Audrie Neenan, Audrie Neenan, you mad, wonderful comedy creature: Where have you been all our lives? At the intermission of Christopher Durang’s deliciously dark farce at the Public Theater, Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them, we dove straight into our Playbill: Who was that blurry vision in red playing Hildegarde, the lovelorn right-wing extremist, and dancing a dotty polka on our hearts? We needed to know. As suspected, you’ve been paying your dues for a while, here and in Chicago, taking over major parts on Broadway (Florence Unger in the cross-cast 1985 version of The Odd Couple, Aunt Eller in the 2002 revival of Oklahoma!)—but flying below our radar until now. Well, we’ve finally crossed paths, and here’s hoping we meet again soon. Because your Hildegarde—an odd bird indeed, part hawk, part loon—is supporting comic acting raised to perfection. How do you make her so crazy, yet so sweet? How do you stay so perfectly sincere while dangling an enormous microphone from between your bosoms? And how do you get your ill-fitting panties (an inspired bit of farcical business from Durang) to fall exactly on cue, again and again? Sure, your costar Kristine Nielsen has gotten the lion’s share of the reviews—she’s giving a lion’s performance. But you’re a lamb, splendidly woolly, and deserve your share as well.

He may not get top billing, but whenever Wesley Taylor takes the stage as Franz, the approval-deprived son of an evil German industrialist in Rock of Ages, he’s the star of the show. Initially an uptight, fey, coldhearted villain—a cross between the MC in Cabaret and the bad guy on the kooky Icelandic kids’ show Lazytown—he’s the kind of character audiences love to boo, and that’s exactly what they do, since the campy ’80s hair-metal musical invites participation.

Of course, underneath his condescending Eurotrash exterior lies a sensitive little boy who just wants to run a confectionery shop in Hamburg. Taylor makes Franz’s calculatedly clichéd transformation into a hilarious and—dare I say it?—legitimately moving journey. No, really! His big moment comes when he and his incongruous love, Lauren Molina as community activist Regina, belt out Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” Franz is finally able to break out of his shell—and his drab navy blue suit. Perhaps even more impressive: Taylor earns big laughs on one of the show’s most obvious lines. After declaring his love for Regina, a chorus member sneers, “I thought you were gay!” After a forlorn look and a long pause, he replies, “I’m not gay; I’m just German!” It was seriously funnier than Legally Blonde’s entire “Is he gay or European?” number.

Taylor may be a Broadway newcomer, but it’s clear he’s here to stay. According to his website, he’s been cast as Lucas, Wednesday’s boyfriend, in the pre-Broadway workshop of The Addams Family musical, starring Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth. We hope he and his Gothic love are given an appropriate showstopper.

Lansbury and O'Connor

Pretty much all of the critics agree: Four-time Tony winner Angela Lansbury is giving a heavenly performance as a muddled medium in the current Broadway revival of Noël Coward’s comedy Blithe Spirit. (David Cote’s review is here.) But beyond Lansbury’s outrageous bohemian garb and outlandish characterization, a less well-known actress is making her own indelible impression: Susan Louise O’Connor, in the tiny but pivotal role of Edith, a hilariously inept maid.

We were delighted with the news that O’Connor had been cast, and even happier that she turns out to be so great. A downtown stalwart, she has always been a master at making sense of impenetrable prose and experimental oddities; she has won several awards and consistent raves for her many appearances in the New York Fringe Festival. Although I haven’t always loved the shows she’s been in, I have found her consistently intelligent, magnetic and versatile.

And yet as Edith—a part that marks her Broadway debut, and reportedly only the second Main Stem audition she’s ever had—O’Connor managed to surprise me. Not only does she more than hold her own alongside a cast of commercial-stage veterans, she shows off her hereto-unseen skill as a physical comedian. Not a maid of many words (a downtrodden “yes, mum” is pretty much all she says), Edith is all about her manic gait, which vacillates between a stooped, lumbering walk and a terrified scamper. She’s easily excitable, and the master of the house—Rupert Everett—often teases her to the point of squealing. In her funniest scene, the diminutive domestic tips over an armchair while trying to lift a heavy tray, her little legs flailing in the air. O’Connor’s success on the Great White Way means we may see less of her below 14th Street, but that’s okay. As long as she continues to grace the New York stage, the world will still be blithe.

The cast of Broadway’s Hair is so well braided that much of the time it seems to move as a single intertwined, undulating unit. But one strand sometimes grabs your eye: the copper-topped, creamy-faced Allison Case. As Crissy, the special Case sings one of the musical’s best-loved songs—the plaintive, unrhymed, artlessly yearning “Frank Mills”—which she delivers with perfect clueless poignancy. Otherwise, Crissy doesn’t get very much to do, yet your eyes are drawn to her when she’s onstage, making her role seem bigger than it is. Something about the way she moves makes her different from the others: Her face shines with sincerity, but she’s often just slightly off the beat; there is a touch of imitation about her urgency, as though maybe she were someone’s younger sister, and not quite sure yet how to fit in. In Diane Paulus’s production, which brings out some of the darker strands in Hair’s tribal weave, she remains an innocent, and her earnestness is both touching and adorable.

When our own David Cote reviewed SOS, Big Art Group’s candy-colored blitz of millennial gobbledygook, he pointed to Mikeah Ernest Jennings as one of the already dizzying productions’ shiniest pixels. After seeing it (and then resting with a cool cloth over my eyes for a few hours), I realized that Jennings is a combination of bright spot, linchpin and savior. As he did in Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment (in which he sported a haircut that combined the positive qualities of a mane and a geyser), Jennings manages to turn his performance up to an impressive amplitude without losing control. In SOS, Jemma Nelson’s hypercaffeinated text has to be delivered at neck-breaking speeds, yet Jennings never loses a single word. He also infuses an otherwise chilly show with warmth—even when he’s portraying a media cutout playing bitchy power games with his friends, he seems like someone you’d die to know.

Our last Scene Stealer of the Week, Mary Testa, is a career criminal in the field of dramatic larceny; anyone who has seen one of her many Broadway shows knows that it’s just a matter of time until she reaches out and grabs a big moment. But this week’s honoree, J. Bernard Calloway, is more of a stealth stealer. In Tracey Scott Wilson’s The Good Negro, he plays Henry Evans, longtime right-hand man to Rev. James Lawrence, the drama’s Martin Luther King Jr.–esque central character. Evans has many roles to play in Lawrence’s life— friend, loyalist, enabler, fellow preacher, fellow philanderer—and Calloway nails the character’s mix of egotism and deference as he moves from petulant backbiting to populist speechifying. The actor’s ebullient charisma has the great advantage of seeming effortless; you hardly notice he’s stolen a scene until it’s gone. We had never seen Calloway before (his Playbill bio lists plenty of regional-theater work but no previous New York credits) but we left looking forward to seeing him again, and soon—perhaps in the musical Memphis, in which he has appeared out of town, and which recently announced plans to open on Broadway this fall.

The latest revival of Guys and Dolls (which has received deservedly scathing reviews) should really be retitled Good and Dead, because there’s not one performer alive up there…except for Mary Testa. The comic character actress—best known for her Tony-nominated turns in the recent revivals of On the Town and 42nd Street—has basically built her career on chewing the scenery. Even when sharing the stage with the riotous Jackie Hoffman in Xanadu, Testa came out, if not on top, then at least in a tie. Her fans may not be legion, but they are loyal: On the night I attended the show, her Guys and Dolls entrance was greeted with a smattering of enthusiastic applause. As General Matilda B. Cartwright, the stuffy supervisor of the Save-a-Soul Mission, Testa, sadly, doesn’t have a lot of stage time, just two scenes and not even one solo song. But boy does she make an impression, particularly in Act II during the big gospel-flavored showstopper “Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat.” As the fever of the spirit moves, she quickly sheds her pent-up ‘tude and starts shaking her hips and wailing on the high notes, keeping time by beating her own butt. Is she pandering? Absolutely. Is it campy? Oh yes. But, oh, what a pleasure it is to see someone on that stage do something entertaining!