My Mom and Frank
By Fausta WertzBack in the olden days, when Frank Langella was playing Dracula on Broadway, my mom came to visit.
I had seen Frank as Dracula a couple of months earlier with a friend, and absolutely loved it. The set and costumes were all in black and white, with only a touch of red (a red rose, a glass of really really red wine), and the set - including the floor - was entirely drawn by Edward Gorey. Then Frank walked in wearing white tie and a black cape lined in red, and you just wanted to get that cape around you.
And let’s not forget that voice. “I do not drink wine,” indeed.
Well, Mom came visiting from Florida and after listening to me describe Frank of course she wanted to go see him on stage. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that she came all the way from Florida just to see Frank, but that was big factor for the trip.
Our family has a Dracula story in its past. When I was a little kid in Puerto Rico we used to visit my aunts who lived in Comerio. Their house is in front of the town square, across from the Catholic church. The church’s bellfry was having some restoration work done and the bats from the bellfry were having to find new lodgings. My siblings and I were watching the Bela Lugosi Dracula on TV when, just at the moment when Bela spreads his cape and turns into a bat, a bat flew in and scared the poop out of everyone.
My aunt Vicenta, who was surprisingly agile for her very advanced age and chornic arthritis, immediately materialized, broom in hand, and swatted the heck out of the poor bat. It took us hours to stop laughing.
But back to Broadway.
Dracula was playing at the Beacon theater, smack in the Times Square cesspool of vice and crime that it used to be in pre-Giuliani days. Among the many peddlers, there was a Hare Krishna dude selling carnations. We were waiting to go into the theater and I gave the guy a buck, he gave me a carnation, and I gave it to my mom. Then we admitted into the theater and sat on a center row balcony seat.
Frank was fabulous.
Mom was in love.
He came out for his curtain call, spread his cape, and mom kissed the carnation on her hand, aimed, shot the carnation out of her hand, and scored: Frank Langella caught it, and kissed it back.
I’ll have to tell her that he’s back on Broadway, playing Thomas Moore in A Man For All Seasons. After all, she hasn’t been to New York for a while.
Tags: , A Man For All Seasons, Broadway, Comerio, entertainment, Fausta Wertz, Frank Langella, Puerto Rico, theater
October 9th, 2008 at 3:42 pm
And NOW he’s knocking ‘em dead as <a href=”http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Frost-Nixon-Trailer-9913.html”Richard M. Nixon in the movie version of Frost/Nixon. I just saw previews at the cinema this afternoon, and he totally inhabits the character. Truly a great actor and an irresistibly attractive man. I’m like your mother. ‘Saw him many years ago in a small NYC theater with Raul Julia and Jill Clayburgh in Noel Coward’s “Design for Living”: Divine!
October 9th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
I saw him in A Man for All Seasons last week and he’s great, although he doesn’t outshine Zach Grenier (ubiquitous character actor who played Ed Norton’s boss in Fight Club) as Cromwell. But he totally nails all the best lines: he goes for laughs rather than high drama in “But for Wales?” and thunders the “And when the devil turned ’round on you” speech very satisfyingly.
October 9th, 2008 at 6:51 pm
Sissy, Wow- Raul Julia AND Langella on the same stage. That would have really been something.
Helen, I’ll have to see it, even if mom doesn’t make the trip north!