New Yorkers were the lucky ones with Nora Ephron’s final work, ‘Lucky Guy’NEW YORK DAILY NEWS - THURSDAY, JULY 4, 2013, 7:47 PM
The Tom Hanks-starring show closed Wednesday. Those who didn’t see it missed out on stellar performances from the cast who told the story of late Daily News journalist Mike McAlary. It didn’t get enough love from Tony voters, but ‘Lucky Guy’ — a New York story and a love story about newspapers — stands with any work ever done on the industry and with Ephron’s amazing body of work.
This was between shows on Wednesday, the last day for a great big Broadway show called “Lucky Guy,” the last great triumph for its gifted author, Nora Ephron. Tom Hanks and the rest of the cast had finished the matinee performance of the show and outside the Broadhurst Theater, Michael Gaston, who played columnist Jim Dwyer, was standing under the marquee, the place where it says, “A New York Play.”
The truth about “Lucky Guy” is that it was a New York story and so much more. This was a love story from Nora Ephron, who started out at the old New York Post a thousand years ago, about newspapers.
“This is why you act,” Gaston, who has done such fine work on television in shows like “The Mentalist” and “Mad Men,” said. “You come to work like this hoping that someday you’ll be a part of an event like this.”
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He was with Danny Mastrogiorgio, a Knicks fan out of Mount Vernon, who grew up reading New York tabloids. Mastrogiorgio remembers reading the late columnist Mike McAlary, whom Tom Hanks brought back to life these past months, but says he was more of a Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill guy.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” said Mastrogiorgio, who played Bob Drury.
Inside the Broadhurst Theater, the entire cast had been on the stage after the matinee, doing a Q&A with audience members. Gaston, Mastrogiorgio and Peter Gerety were there. So was Peter Scolari, who played Michael Daly, and Courtney Vance, who won a Tony for his performance as the late editor Hap Hairston; and Christopher McDonald, a streak of verbal light as lawyer Eddie Hayes.
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Maura Tierney, who gave a beautiful portrayal of Mike McAlary’s wife Alice, was there. So was Richard Masur, and Deirdre Lovejoy, and Brian Dykstra, who himself once worked at a sports paper, now gone, known as The National.
And Tom Hanks was there. He is this generation’s Spencer Tracy in the movies, that kind of movie star. And somehow after the movie career he is having, came to New York and to Broadway and breathed this kind of life and talent into McAlary’s life and death, and into Nora’s words.
“If you are an actor,” Tom Hanks said, “you dream about being in a company of actors like this. And being in New York in a play like this.”
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So we said goodbye to “Lucky Guy” this week. It was the life of McAlary, whom I met when he was 14, up on that stage. But it was Nora’s life, too, and Dwyer’s and Daly’s and Drury’s. And mine. It was the life of my editor, who came to the jazziness of tabloid newspapers in England, and my sports editor’s, and the people who write for this paper and edit it, even when they have to go to Jersey to do it after a disaster like Hurricane Sandy.
Eight times a week, “Lucky Guy” got it exactly right, even if not nearly enough Tony voters had the taste or judgment to reward Nora’s writing, or Hanks’ performance.
The actors all knew about “Lucky Guy” from the start. So did George Wolfe, the director, who began driving the thing to 44th St. with Nora Ephron long before she was gone.
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“We think of ourselves as a couple of tough guys,” Mike Gaston said on 44th St., nodding at Mastrogiorgio. “The first night both of us cried. Because we did know.”
So they were the same as the people in the seats. Every night those people would cry, laugh their heads off, and finally stand and cheer. Talk about anything else on Broadway. Nora’s New York story was the story of the year.
I watched the last matinee performance with Nora’s longtime assistant J.J. Sacha, and with a great writer and reporter and gent named Nick Pileggi, a dear old friend who was married to Nora Ephron for the last 25 years of her life.
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Nick knows how hard and how long his wife worked to bring McAlary’s story to Broadway, even when she was dying. On Wednesday he laughed at lines — lines he knew in his heart — along with everybody else, cried at the end as Tom Hanks stepped forward and talked about the last days of Mike McAlary’s life, as Mike lay dying of cancer at Columbia-Presbyterian.
“There was no official commitment from the director or from the star when Nora died,” Nick said. “It turned out we didn’t need one, just because they were both committed to Nora.”
“Lucky Guy” now stands with any work ever done on newspapers, “The Front Page” or Richard Brooks’ “Deadline USA,” or “Woman of the Year;” or “All the President’s Men,” for which William Goldman won an Academy Award. It also stands with anything Nora Ephron ever wrote, and that is saying plenty after the amazing career she had.
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Colin Callender, the executive producer of “Lucky Guy” was saying “1,212” at the back of the theater Wednesday, referring to the capacity of the Broadhurst. Each of the 1,212 seats was filled every night.
“That was our magic number,” he says.
The real magic came from Nora’s words, from the performances, from a show about newspapers that made people cheer, and made you understand why newspapers still matter and always have and always will. New York story, love story. The one who wrote it, Nora Ephron, would have loved the way it turned out most of all.
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