Now Barbra Can Check Our Michael Urie's Babs
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED JUNE, 2016
Barbra Streisand can finally see the off-Broadway hit about, well, Barbra Streisand — in the privacy of her own living room, with the curtains closed and perhaps in a fetal position.
And that’s just as it should be, says Michael Urie, who starred in Jonathan Tolin’s comedy “Buyer & Cellar.” He is recreating his acclaimed performance — the reviews were like “buttah” — at the Westport Country Playhousethrough July 3.
The show, directed by Stephen Brackett again, is being filmed live for New York’s public television station Thirteen over two performances at the end of the month. It will be later broadcast on “Theater Close-Up,” the series showcasing off-Broadway and regional shows for tri-state viewers, and no doubt available eventually on DVD and hence a way for the superstar to take a private peek at the show.
“I think if Barbra was able to see it as a whole, she would like it, but I think there are too many things that are said along the way that would make her upset. The only way for her to see it, really, would be on video,” he says.
In the solo show Urie plays Alex More, a fictional out-of-work actor who finds employment on Streisand’s Malibu estate. There in the basement of her manse he oversees a faux street of “shoppes” — “of relentless good taste combined with the total lack of financial restraint” — where the actress-singer-director stores and presents her art, acquisitions and memorabilia, creating a kind of pretend mini-mall for a clientele of one.
In the play, witty, lovable Alex forms a special relationship with the superstar that is both tender, tough and ever-so tenuous.