What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?- Page 2
What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
SomethingPeculiar
Broadway Legend Joined: 6/15/14
#25re: What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
Posted: 7/20/14 at 10:04am
Pill did the very short-lived 2010 revival with Abigail Breslin, ELizabeth Franz and Matthew Modine. It lasted 38 performances:
http://www.playbillvault.com/Show/Detail/Whos_who/3214/357/The-Miracle-Worker
#26re: What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
Posted: 7/20/14 at 12:03pm
Sorry to hear about the young woman's passing.
At the time the Swank production was happening, her career had cooled significantly. It had been several years since she won the Oscar for Boys Don't Cry, and her only other major film role during that time, The Affair of the Necklace, was a flop. (She had a supporting role in Christopher Nolan's Insomnia, which also underperformed) Million Dollar Baby hadn't happened yet, and she was definitely looking for a play to give her career a jolt. I believe she was committed to Arthur Miller's After the Fall for Roundabout at one point, but that didn't end up happening with her.
This Miracle Worker did an out-of-town tryout in North Carolina that seems to have been a fiasco. The reports are that Swank wasn't confident in the role, and the production (directed by Arthur Penn) was all over the place. The Weisslers, who were producing, decided that it was in no shape to come to New York and pulled the plug. I find it hard to believe that it would all come down to the availability of one of the play's male actors, considering that neither of the major male roles are really make-or-break, and neither of the actors cast in those roles were name actors.
There was also the matter of Swank only doing a seven-performance week, with a Wednesday matinee alternate.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Tag
Broadway Legend Joined: 11/19/05
#27re: What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
Posted: 7/20/14 at 12:05pm
LOL
The mystery is that I used the search function.
RippedMan
Broadway Legend Joined: 8/14/05
#28re: What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
Posted: 7/20/14 at 12:14pmWhy would they ever allow her to only do 7 shows a week? That seems weak.
#29re: What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
Posted: 7/20/14 at 12:15pm
The production with Swank was directed by Marianne Elliott (who would later triumph with WAR HORSE) not Arthur Penn. Penn directed the original production, and the film.
The production that made it to Broadway with Alison Pill and Abigail Breslin was a huge disappointment. Neither was well cast (Pill being too physically slight, and Breslin being too big and too old) and Kate Whoriskey directed all the excitement out of it (I never knew the infamous 'breakfast table' scene, surely one of the most physical pieces of staging in any play could be so tame and flat).
And of course THE MIRACLE WORKER may be one of the only plays that just can not be staged in the round.
Huge misfire that no doubt diminished the reputation of a beautiful play that deserved better.
Updated On: 7/20/14 at 12:15 PM
#30re: What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
Posted: 7/20/14 at 12:27pm
Penn was brought in during the out-of-town run to try and take over the reins from Elliott, who was in over her head. I should have made that clear, sorry. I misremembered
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
Updated On: 7/20/14 at 12:27 PM
VIETgrlTerifa
Broadway Legend Joined: 1/18/04
#31re: What happened with Hilary Swank and Miracle Worker?
Posted: 7/20/14 at 12:36pmThis is the show people watch just to see it get physical. People like a good rumble. Anita knows.
"I've got to get me out of here
This place is full of dirty old men
And the navigators and their mappy maps
And moldy heads and pissing on sugar cubes
While you stare at your books."
