Rough Crossing

About Rough Crossing

Not-so-Private (Backstage) Lives
(on the Silver Screen)

 

Whether we’re shopping for groceries or flipping through TV channels, we're inundated with media that broadcast every detail of the off-screen lives of our favorite actors. The unrelenting paparazzi and voracious scandalmongers run celebrities into the ground until their private lives are no longer, well . . . private. After ogling their messy romances and other un-retouched moments, we little people often shake off the enchantment of “stars.” But before the deployment of heat-seeking media (around 1960), the backstage lives of performers were shrouded in mystique and fired our imaginations.

From the 1920s to the ’40s, the backstage lives of actors were a favorite subject of both Broadway and an emerging Hollywood. Actors attracted attention via both their talent and their public personas. So capitalizing on our desire to see what happens once the curtain falls or the camera stops shooting, writers generated many plays and films that imagine the lives less ordinary of actors in their (more or less) natural habitats. 

With the Great Depression in 1929, people tended toward merry entertainment to forget hardship, and the glitzy backstage lives of favorite entertainers, naturally, became a regular subject for musicals and comedies. The Broadway Melody (1929) depicts a vaudeville sister act come to Broadway for their big break, only to get entangled in a love triangle with a song-and-dance man. 1933’s 42nd Street features a Broadway producer who finds himself in a quandary when his lead actress breaks her ankle the night before opening. With his life hanging upon this production’s success, the producer has to train the new lead within twenty-four hours.

Backstage life also translated well into screwball comedy. In Twentieth Century (1934), hot-tempered Broadway impresario Oscar Jaffe, bankrupt after a series of flops, boards the famous train where he runs into Lily Garland, a former lover and chorus girl whom he molded into a star. He uses his directorial verve to win her back, constructing elaborate plots from faked suicide to imported camels. In On the Avenue (1937), heiress Mimi Caraway is angry to find her family burlesqued in a Broadway musical revue, but also strangely attracted to the lead actor, Gary Blake. Mona, who plays the ersatz Mimi on stage, is also in love with Gary, and her jealousy leads her to play Mimi for laughs. Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942) chronicles the adventures of a Polish theatre company, led by Joseph and Maria Tura, during Nazi occupation. The company suddenly finds itself politically involved when the Turas must help a young Polish aviator assassinate a German spy. 

The theatre scene of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s continues to provide rich material for films today. In the midst of the unmediated display of celebrities’ private lives, contemporary writers and directors continue to look back to that time when on-stage personas could actually be larger-than-life, and we could imagine and fantasize about them as much as we wanted. In Barton Fink (1991), the Coen brothers draw a comically grim portrait of an early ’40s playwright concerned with depicting social realism (loosely based on Clifford Odets). His success on Broadway leads him to profit-crazy Hollywood, where he is given the task of writing a B-grade wrestling movie. Woody Allen touched upon the Jazz Age in Bullets Over Broadway (1994): playwright David Shayne, new to Broadway, is forced to hire his backer’s moll, Olive Neal, a no-talent actress with a voice like nails on a blackboard. In the end it’s Olive’s bodyguard, Cheech, who lends a significant hand in the playwriting, “solving” the Olive problem with some well-placed hot lead. 

By offering privileged access to the “artists-only” area of the Golden Age period, these movies appeal to our expectation of the glitz and glam of lives dedicated to the stage, and the struggle and romance behind the curtain still fascinate us. Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing fulfills this desire as it serves up behind-the-scenes antics. A team of writers and actors try to mend their soggy script and sinking romances before their ship sails into New York for their Broadway premiere. We may laugh at their folly or cry with their despair. But in the end, we still celebrate the life-on-stage.


—WALTER BYONGSOK CHON
Production Dramaturg