FLOWERS IN THE ATTIC

From July 1942 to August 1944, Anne Frank hid in the attic at 263 Prinsengracht, in Amsterdam, until the Gestapo arrested her and her family and sent them to Auschwitz. This month, director James Lapine will bring her back to Broadway. The original stage version ran for 717 performances at the Cort and Ambassador Theatres. From left to right, cast members Austin Pendleton as Mr. Dussel, Jonathan Kaplan as Peter Van Daan, George Hearn as Mr. Frank, Linda Lavin as Mrs. Van Daan, Harris Yulin as Mr. Van Daan, Rachel Miner as Margot Frank, Natalie Portman as Anne Frank, and Sophie Hayden as Mrs. Frank.

Photographed in New York on October 15, 1997.

ENCORE, ANNE FRANK

Spotlight

It's one of the season's most eagerly anticipated shows, but the question remains: Will The Diary of Anne Frank seem old-fashioned when the new production, directed by James Lapine, opens on December 4 at the Music Box Theatre? The play hasn't exactly aged well—largely because ideas about stagecraft have changed so much since the days when realism was in vogue. Also, the 1955 Pulitzer Prize-winning script has been charged with softening the impact of the Holocaust. But Lapine is restoring some of the architectural details in the attic, and sprucing it up besides. He has cast the beautiful young Natalie Portman (soon to be seen in the Star Wars prequels) in the title role. He's also brought in playwright Wendy Kesselman to help heighten elements that were de-emphasized in the original script (such as Frank's sexual awakening).

Lapine, known for his highly theatrical, innovative stagings (Sunday m the Park with George and A Winter's Tale), may seem an odd choice for this naturalistic drama, but Jewish family life and female coming-of-age are the subjects of two of his own plays, Table Settings and Twelve Dreams. He says that the Frank estate has been very cooperative about the revisions of the Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett script. "We chose different material froq the diaries than they chose. We tried to take the melodrama out of the play—it's sort of written as a melodrama—and breathe new life into the characters so that they're gnore interesting people to spend time in a small space with." Who says an attic has to be full of cobwebs?

MIMI KRAMER