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Maria full of grace
Julie Andrews gets a new Boyfriend
BY CAROLYN CLAY

Mary Poppins flew through town last June, sans parasol, to announce that Julie Andrews had morphed into Blake Edwards. (Talk about Victor/Victoria.) The actress, who turns 70 this month, has forsaken performing in musicals to direct one — Sandy Wilson’s The Boyfriend, in which she made her Broadway debut in 1954. Andrews was on her way to East Haddam, Connecticut, where she would spend eight weeks mounting the Riviera-set "loving spoof of 1920s musical comedies" in which an English heiress falls for a delivery boy. The show, which she describes as "sweetly, endearingly inane," opened at Goodspeed Opera House last July and now plays Boston’s Shubert Theatre, as part of a subsequent tour, October 11 through 23.

Andrews took the stage looking boyishly elegant in a white pants suit and long peach scarf and claimed to remember vividly her last appearance there — in the 1960 pre-Broadway tryout of Camelot. But she’s done chronicling "The Simple Joys of Maidenhood." Now it’s on to "How do you solve a problem like The Boyfriend?" Andrews, whose singing days were curtailed by botched 1998 vocal-cord surgery (for which she’s reported to have collected $30 million in damages), started her late-life affair with the show that introduced her to Broadway in 2003, when she directed The Boyfriend at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor. "It’s a piece I know very well, and it holds many happy memories for me." But isn’t the 1954 musical comedy, well, dated? Andrews retorted that in a sense it was dated from the beginning, since it harks back to the musicals of the ’20s. But she went on, "The little piece is very well constructed. It’s a lovely piece of lace. I have some little things planned to make it more vibrant and vital. But it doesn’t need much tweaking."

The show, she revealed slyly, is also a family affair. The sets and costumes are by her first husband, Tony-winning designer Tony Walton. "We thought we’d keep it in the family, as he is my first spouse. But he’s such a good and talented first spouse." Not even Walton, however, could come up with the outfits concocted, to Andrews’s amusement, by patrons of the popular sing-along showings of The Sound of Music. One man, she said, turned up nearly naked but painted gold. He was, he said, "ray, a drop of golden sun."

Asked what it’s like "to be an icon," the down-to-earth Andrews replied that "this icon has five children, is still a mom, with seven grandchildren." The crystalline singing voice may be stilled, and she’s quite frank about it. "My singing voice is just nonexistent." She doesn’t even offer a musical paean to "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" in the shower. "But my speaking voice is fine. And thank God it happened late in my career. It would have been 100 times worse if it had happened earlier."

Not that a non-singing Andrews is an idle Andrews. The Boyfriend marks her directorial debut, but she continues to make films, including The Princess Diaries and Shrek 2. She has been a successful author of children’s books, including the Dumpy the Dumptruck and Little Bo series, for 30 years. And, she revealed, she’s writing her autobiography. "The pleasure is in being allowed to play in so many different sandboxes."

The Boyfriend | Shubert Theatre, 265 Tremont St, Boston | October 11-23 | $30-$75 | Shubert box office or 800.447.7400 or http://www.wangcenter.org/


Issue Date: October 7 - 13, 2005
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