A Broadway Revival

THE VIOLET HOUR LIGHTS UP THE BILTMORE

For an actor, the opening of a new theater on Broadway is as exciting "as being a chef and someone giving you another oven," says Robert Sean Leonard. The theater of which the award-winning actor speaks is not just any theater: it's the landmark Biltmore, on 47th Street, which has been standing neglected since 1987. Restored and revamped, it will reopen this fall as home to the Manhattan Theatre Club, with Leonard playing the lead in Richard Greenberg'sThe Violet Hour. The play, which received rave reviews when it ran in Chicago last spring, will be directed by Evan Yionoulis and will star Mario Cantone, Jasmine Guy, Laura Benanti, and Scott Foley. It concerns the mysteries of time and destiny in the thought-provoking ways of which Greenberg (Take Me Out) has emerged as a celebrated master. Set in Manhattan in 1919, it rests on the dilemma of a publisher (Leonard) who must decide between publishing a massive and important book or an erotic autobiography by a black vaudeville songstress. It is an apt choice for a theater that in 1928 saw Mae West, a cast of 54 (still in stage makeup and dress), and the producers of The Pleasure Man carted off to jail in paddy wagons on opening night for presenting what the authorities delightfully deemed "an obscene, indecent, immoral and impure drama." With 75 years between The Pleasure Man and The Violet Hour, there's probably less distance between Greenberg's metaphysical meditations and West's keen sauciness than we like to think—even if Leonard, Greenberg, and company don't end up collared by the law. If walls talk, the Biltmore itself may reveal the answer. "I don't tend to the mystical at all," says the playwright. "But I think theaters should be old. There's romance to them that can't be equaled by even the most beautiful new one."

EDWARD HELMORE