Stephanie tricks Efram into MTC play

By PAT ST. GERMAIN, ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

Fri, August 27, 2004
A bit of trickery led veteran actor Efram Zimbalist Jr. to the cast of the Tennessee Williams play Night of the Iguana at Manitoba Theatre Centre Nov. 18 - Dec. 11. His daughter, Stephanie Zimbalist, was cast some time ago in the MTC co-production with Rubicon Theatre of Ventura, Calif. She suggested to Rubicon co-founder and director Jim O'Neil that her father play 97-year-old poet Jonathan Coffin -- she plays his granddaughter Hannah Jelkes -- and the pair cooked up a scheme to hook him on the role.

"We kind of ambushed him actually," O'Neil says.

Stephanie Zimbalist, best known for playing private eye Laura Holt opposite Pierce Brosnan in 1982-87 NBC series Remington Steele (see also Suite 1157@yahoogroups.com), took a script to her 86-year-old father's home under the pretense that she wanted him to hear her read her lines before the pair met O'Neil for a social lunch the following day.

"We made arrangements to meet for lunch and we sprung it on him right then -- he was shocked at first and ultimately overjoyed," O'Neil says.

The New York City-born son of concert violinist Efrem Zimbalist and opera star Alma Gluck, Efram Zimbalist Jr. played private eye Stu Bailey in 1958-64 ABC series 77 Sunset Strip and senior agent Lewis Erskine in 1965-74 ABC series The F.B.I. He has a long list of stage and movie credits. He acted with his daughter in a 1979 TV movie, but this will be their first theatre collaboration.

O'Neil says the veteran actor is in great shape, and his role is not physically demanding since he sits in a wheelchair for most of his time onstage.

His daughter has a long association with the Rubicon Theatre. She attended a play there during its debut season in 1998 with her friend Jenny Sullivan -- who will direct Ronald Harwood's The Dresser at MTC next spring -- and has since performed in four Rubicon productions.

MTC and Rubicon Theatre co-produced Mating Dance of the Werewolf, which debuted at MTC Warehouse in March.

Vincent in Brixton

By JOEL HIRSCHHORN

(Pasadena Playhouse; 686 seats; $ 49.50 top)

Tuesday, August 24, 2004
A Pasadena Playhouse West Coast premiere presentation of a play in four acts by Nicholas Wright. Directed by Elina de Santos. Sets, John Iacovelli; costumes, Maggie Morgan; lighting, Leigh Allen; sound, Pierre Dupree; stage manager, Megan Wright. Opened Aug. 20, 2004; reviewed Aug. 22; closes Sept. 19. Running Time: 2 HOURS, 30 MIN.

Ursula Loyer .....Stephanie Zimbalist

Vincent Van Gogh .....Graham Miller

Eugenie Loyer .....Carolyn Palmer

Sam Plowman .....Trevor Murphy

Anna Van Gogh .....Tracie Lockwood

He's a stormy fellow, isn't he?" comments Eugenie (Carolyn Palmer) about Vincent Van Gogh (Graham Miller), the new lodger her mother has welcomed into their Brixton, England, home. For a full 40 minutes of "Vincent in Brixton," we're forced to take her word for it. Nicholas Wright's play is subdued, talky and painstakingly slow in its buildup of backstory information, but what follows afterward is far more interesting --- the development of an unexpected and intriguing romance. It helps provide a fresh look at the emotionally fragile painter before madness triggered his suicide at 37.

Van Gogh lived in Brixton for three years (1873 and 1876). In Wright's Tony-nominated drama, Vincent is shown as a nervous and naive art dealer who falls for his landlady's daughter Eugenie (Palmer) and reluctantly recognizes that she prefers the other lodger in his boardinghouse, aspiring artist Sam (Trevor Murphy). He finds comfort in conversations with Eugenie's mother, Ursula (Stephanie Zimbalist), sensing a kindred spirit in her dark, depressive psyche, and their "mental affinity" melts into passion.

Cliches occasionally intrude ("no woman is old as long as she loves and is loved"), but these platitudes are beside the point when Zimbalist's Ursula transforms from pinched, conservative widow to a glowing, hopeful woman. Maggie Morgan's costumes, dreary dresses changing to outfits that emphasize Zimbalist's revitalized beauty, make the metamorphosis convincing. Zimbalist's responses have an understated grace and refinement, yet she dexterously suggests physical desire. Miller brings a disarming innocence to such lines as "I want to unbutton your blouse," as sexual and artistic awakening overtake him simultaneously.

Disaster strikes with the arrival of Vincent's overbearing, brutally intrusive sister Anna (Tracie Lockwood). Anna is like those one-dimensional bad girls of 1940s films who existed just to wreck relationships and families, spying on everyone and blatantly accusing Eugenie of having an affair with her brother. Watching her destroy the happiness between Vincent and Ursula is tensely compelling, although it's hard to believe a 19th century woman could be so arrogantly, tactlessly confrontational.

Whether turbulent or serene, the Brixton cottage is luminously alive throughout, due to John Iacovelli's creation of French doors that open into a patio featuring apple trees against blue skies, huge wooden ceiling beams, china cabinets and an authentic, fully operating kitchen stove. Leigh Allen's lighting provides equal pleasure as the skies change color, and trademark Van Gogh sunflowers are spotlighted in an otherwise dark room.

Since the relationships depicted are fact and fiction, a satisfying climax is difficult to attain, and Wright's solution misses. Vincent has left Ursula without explanation and when he returns --- put off by painting and fanatically religious --- their final meeting has a glum, depressing quality.

Zimbalist is given a well-written speech, in which she cries, "all I wanted was ... to be the cause of something remarkable," but her desperate desire to function as the muse that stimulates Vincent to greatness doesn't work, because we haven't seen enough passionate artistic support from her in early scenes. Nor does the staging have sufficient emotional impact when Vincent starts sketching again under her inspirational influence.

Despite this, the portrayals are uniformly strong. As Vincent's friend and rival, Trevor Murphy cuts a confidently open, engaging figure, and Palmer's Eugenie is impressive when informing Anna to keep her "filthy suspicions" to herself.

Vincent is a major challenge to an actor, since we know that all youthful optimism will eventually be wiped away by insanity. Miller meticulously suggests a mind under psychological siege when his Van Gogh reacts angrily to Sam's drawings, or leaps from infatuation with Eugenie to love for her mother.

Elina de Santos' direction enables him to negotiate this narrow line between shaky stability and deepening despair. Wright's play, though sometimes as schizophrenic in its mood shifts as Vincent himself, becomes a thoughtful look at the bewildering inconsistencies within every artist's nature.

Photo caption: ISN'T IT 'ROMANTIQUE'? Hershey Felder (left, with costars Anthony Crivello and Stephanie Zimbalist) stars as Chopin in his new play.

He has an ear for musicians' lives
Actor-pianist brings Chopin and Gershwin to life in his plays

By Gregory M. Lamb | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. Š What do George Gershwin, Frˇdˇric Chopin, and Ludwig van Beethoven have in common (besides, well, the obvious)?

Each composer's artistic triumphs were mirrored by personal tragedies, with Gershwin and Chopin dying before 40 and Beethoven going deaf. They're also all being reborn onstage thanks to Hershey Felder, himself a composer and pianist.

As a writer, Mr. Felder has meticulously researched their lives. As an actor playing them, he's got a trump card: He's an outstanding pianist, who can authentically bring each man and his art to the stage.

Felder's one-man show "George Gershwin Alone" has just completed a 1,200-performance tour across the US, including a stop on Broadway, to generally strong reviews and packed houses. Friday night marks the world premi¸re of "Romantique," his three-person play about Chopin, at the American Repertory Theatre (ART) in Cambridge, Mass.

For "Romantique," Felder dons a blond wig to play Chopin. He's called in two friends, actress Stephanie Zimbalist and actor Anthony Crivello, to play the roles of Chopin's lover, author George Sand, and his friend, painter Eug¸ne Delacroix.

The play takes place at Sand's serene chateau in the French countryside on a weekend in 1846. It was the last time Chopin and Delacroix ever visited there. What we learn about Chopin, Felder says, "is that sometimes the art may be perfect, but the man is not."

To research "Romantique," Felder took his entire 22-member cast and crew to France to visit neighborhoods in Paris and elsewhere associated with the three artists. "We had the greatest time in the world," he says. "Whether it will add anything to the play, I don't know," he says with a shrug. "But, God, it was fun."

Each of Felder's plays has something a little different to say. The Gershwin show is about the songwriter's "relationship with his audience," he explains. "Chopin is the relationship of artists to each other and to their art." The yet-to-come Beethoven play, he says, is about "man's relationship to God. He was perhaps the greatest composer who ever lived. He was deaf. Is that an injustice? Was it a necessity? ... Think what it means to be deaf and yet have that gift."

TV and film director Joel Zwick ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding") codirected the play with theatrical veteran Andrew Robinson. But make no mistake: This is a Hershey Felder "imagination," and he loves being involved in every nook and cranny of it.

"It's my nature," he says of the personal way he runs his production company. "I just enjoy being creative." With his wavy dark hair, he looks even younger than his 30-something years as he settles into a seat in the ART auditorium to talk about "Romantique" and his career.

"I want to create an ensemble in which people trust each other and have a good time," he says, explaining why he chose people he already knew and didn't hold auditions. "It's just my style. I don't know if it's right or wrong, but it's the way I want to do it."

Felder, who is married to Kim Campbell, former prime minister of Canada, is able to talk passionately about everything from the importance of music at dinner parties to his ultimate wish "to be an ambassador for peace." He can even avoid making that last sound ridiculous - maybe because he's the first to concede it's a "ridiculous thing to say."

Mr. Robinson says he's run into another one of Felder's passions: a demand for authenticity. When Robinson wanted to make dialogue changes, Felder insisted that any new words come from either Delacroix's diaries, Sand's autobiography, or Chopin's notebooks. Robinson tried to convince him that the audience won't know the difference, but Felder "doesn't want anything that we're just concocting," Robinson says.

Felder listened to Gershwin's playing when he created his one-man show, but Chopin lived before the era of audio recordings. So Felder is drawing on "tons" of written material about the Polish expatriate's style and technique.

"Probably a lot of people nowadays play better than Chopin ever played," Felder says. "But we imagine it to be something else. It was new in those days - the quiet playing, the virtuoso stuff. This is a whole other time now."

When he sits down to write, Felder concedes, "it hurts just to get the stuff on paper." But he has found writing for three characters this time "much more fun" than creating a monologue.

"I don't want to tell the audience everything," he says of his playwriting style. "Clues. Clues. Always clues. And let the audience put the pieces together."

"Romantique" was originally "two huge acts," he says. But he cut and cut until "you only see what you need to see to get the picture." It now runs at less than two hours, with no intermission.

What music and playwriting have in common, Felder says, is a certain mathematical structure, carefully planned but hidden. Rhythm and sound are crucial. "Sometimes an actor will suggest a line, and I'll say, 'No, no, you can't do that.' And they'll say 'Why?' And I say, 'because if I'm sitting in an audience, my ear doesn't hear that.' "

"George Gershwin Alone" won kudos from critics as thoroughly entertaining. But some questioned whether Felder really revealed anything significant about Gershwin and his demons.

"Gershwin was a man who wasn't looking deep inside [himself] and that's what I reveal in the play," Felder says. "And it took the right critics to understand it. That was the darkness of the character, that he refused to let anyone inside, or couldn't let anybody inside."

In the course of a four-year run that ended this summer, that criticism "slowly disappeared because people saw this was a success: [They began to say] 'maybe he knows what he's talking about.' "

He says he now realizes that some people are always "going to tell you you're not worth anything. And I'm going to get that on ['Romantique'], too."

Felder says his interest in pursuing his own "imaginations" isn't about having to have control. "The only power I want is to be completely and unequivocally generous," he says.

Ms. Zimbalist, who once teamed with Pierce Brosnan on the TV detective series "Remington Steele" before going into a long career in theater, can attest to that. Recently, during Felder's only night off from a grueling schedule of Gershwin performances he invited eight people, including Zimbalist, to his home for a dinner he prepared. "That's Hershey Felder," she says in a phone interview. "He didn't even think about it."

But Felder isn't about to relinquish control, either. Right now, commitments to take the show to Philadelphia, Washington, Florida, and New York are tentative.

"I will make the final decision about whether it's going to happen," he says. No matter what anyone else says, "If I don't like it, it ain't happening. So we'll see."

Inside look intrigues veteran film extra: Close encounters with stars cherished

By Carroll Nox Devine
St. Bernard/Plaquemines bureau

Sunday July 20, 2003
In Ed Held's line of work, he's been a hostage, tied up on the floor with his mouth taped shut, a newsman chasing after Melanie Griffith, a grunt in boot camp covered with mud, a chef, a bartender and a priest.

He never knows what he'll be next.

Held, a 58-year-old Arabi resident, is a film extra who has worked in more than a dozen movies and appeared in several TV shows and commercials. His rˇsumˇ includes roles in such films as "Runaway Jury," "Monsters Ball," "JFK," "Crazy in Alabama," "Double Indemnity" and "My Name is Nobody."

When "Unchain My Heart," the Ray Charles story, was being filmed in New Orleans recently, Held was a part of that, too, savoring the locations, he said.

"We worked in the Saenger Theater and the gorgeous Orpheum Theater. I sat in all three balconies and I just gazed at all the gorgeous art nouveau figures and the gold filigree," Held said. "It's starting to crumble a little, so I hope the symphony restores the luster. I would love to sit in that place again to see movies. I saw all the Walt Disney movies there, falling in love with Annette Funicello."

Held fell so much in love that he became president of Funicello's fan club.

Held, a retired freelance artist, has had a thing for movies all his life. "Going to the movies was an event then," he said.

So in the 1960s when he met an agent at a party, he managed to get his first work as an extra in a film called "This Property is Condemned," starring Natalie Wood and Robert Redford.

"I was about 17, and I kind of begged him to let me in," Held said. "I was a kid, dressed in knickers, standing on a corner watching a preacher. I was impressed seeing Natalie Wood and Robert Redford, and Natalie signed some still photos for me."

Extras asking stars for autographs today is strongly frowned upon and can sometimes result in the extras being fined, Held said. Working on the set isn't very glamorous -- unless you're picked to perform in front of the camera, he said.

"If you're very young there's certainly a better chance that you'll be in the front line for certain scenes," he said. "Other times, being mature has its advantages. Like me, as I was chosen at the very last for the final scene between Billy Bob Thornton and Halle Berry in 'Monsters Ball.' Certainly in some scenes with tourists or banks, the directors want an assortment of believable (read 'older') people."

For anyone wanting to do movie work, Held suggests starting out early, getting a good agent, and following the rules. "You have to have a certain wardrobe and shoes that are standard. You have to be willing to do anything. Just being there is a shot at something," he said.

You also have to learn the lingo and know your marks, Held said. Terms like "stand-by," "action," "rolling," and "back to one" are important to know if you want to stay in important scenes. "If you goof, you may be asked to 'step out,' and that's NOT glamorous," he said.

Extras also must have a lot of patience, said Held, who has sometimes had to be on the set at 6 a.m., have wardrobe checks and changes, and then hurry up and wait to do his thing about noon. Extra work doesn't pay much either, unless you're getting overtime, and it's not regular enough to count on for supporting yourself.

On the other hand, there are certain benefits, he said. Held has had several close encounters and even chats with stars such as Billy Bob Thornton, Larry Hagman, Stephanie Zimbalist, Melanie Griffith and Ed Asner.

"Film work is satisfying to me because I love fantasy, artifice and escapism," he said. "Plus, I can feel like a kid again. It speaks to the child within us. If I were younger, say 16 or 21, I'd go full steam ahead with a film career. I can't because of disabilities. Now, I'm content to linger on its edges. With my limitations, it helps me keep my boat in the water and continue to row. At my age, if you stop rowing you go nowhere."

What might be the best part about the whole movie experience, apart from the memories you make, Held said, is this: "When you see yourself up on the screen for that brief moment, it's pure magic."

Springtime in Paris

For his new play, Hershey Felder took his cast, crew to France to soak up the spirit of Chopin

By Ethan Gilsdorf, Globe Correspondent

7/20/2003
ARIS -- Most playwrights would be satisfied to have their lead actors read up on the historical characters they portray, wear the bodice or the sideburns, and do their best with period accents.

Not Hershey Felder. For his upcoming production ''Romantique,'' Felder invited not only his core cast but a 22-person entourage of directors, actors, set designers, photographers, publicists, chefs, spouses, and even a resident scholar on a four-day inspirational tour of Paris and the countryside.

The idea? Re-create one summer night in 1846: the final time composer Frederic Chopin and painter Eugene Delacroix would visit writer George Sand's Chateau de Nohant.

Clearly, Felder, who'll play Chopin, sees method acting as an extreme sport.

''I was desperate to go back in time,'' he says, surrounded by a mound of luggage. ''I should have been born in the 1820s. I feel lost in the wrong century.''

The line between the play and play time has been intentionally blurred on this trip. Felder wanted his entire cast and crew to soak up some 19th-century ambiance and have a good time. ''The thing that I love most is to produce,'' he says. ''To host a party in Paris and live with them in 1846 is a dream come true.''

Felder is perched on the edge of a chair in the Left Bank flat he rented as his production team's temporary Paris headquarters -- naturally, at the same address, 19 Quai Malaquais, where George Sand once lived. Just this morning, the group returned from its two-day sojourn in Nohant-Vic, the site of Sand's country escape.

Now it's a sultry Saturday late spring afternoon, their last in Paris before heading home.

Various personnel rush about with costumes, equipment, and mysterious black bags. Celebrity photographer Lance Staedler and his assistants arrange cameras and lights. Doorbells buzz. Phones ring. The play's codirector, Joel Zwick of ''My Big Fat Greek Wedding'' fame, wanders by in stocking feet.

''I think it has made a difference to be here, to immerse yourself in the period, to hang with people and become a family,'' says Zwick, who's enjoying the wining-and-dining free ride. ''That will help pull this together.''

''We call these pieces `imaginations,' '' explains Felder, as caterers lay out an impressive spread of Lebanese dishes for lunch. ''We don't want to say we know what it was like to be them. We can only pretend.''

Continuing a trilogy ''Romantique'' opens Aug. 1 for a two-week engagement at the American Repertory Theatre's Loeb Drama Center. Part two in a planned trilogy of musical plays celebrating the lives of musicians, the new work comes on the heels of Felder's popular one-man show ''George Gershwin Alone,'' which enjoyed a sold-out run at the ART's Cambridge home last summer, and finishes its return engagement this Saturday. (Part three is slated to be about Beethoven.)

The Gershwin piece was ''the first test,'' says Felder, a polished pianist, composer, actor, and musical theater addict who suffers from no lack of confidence. ''It went from a three-week run to 1,200 performances [including] Broadway. I was the one to do it. I had the right combination of stuff.''

Putting actors in period costume is not enough, he says. You have to understand what drives the characters -- a quest he says has involved three years of research. His Paris pilgrimage, he hopes, will be the inspirational icing on the cake.

''This play will be more than just wearing a wig and sitting in front of a piano,'' Felder vows.

In ''Romantique,'' Felder explores a famed friendship that brought together literary, musical, and artistic cultures in 19th-century France.

Seduced by Parisian salons, Amandine Aurore Lucie Dupin left her husband to pursue the literary life, assumed the pen name of George Sand, and found herself alongside Balzac, Liszt, Delacroix, and Chopin, whom she fell for, financially supported, and lived with for about a decade. Thanks in part to her largesse, Chopin became arguably the greatest composer of music for the piano.

Known for his monumental canvases and considered France's most accomplished Romantic painter, Delacroix instructed Sand's children in art and lived on the estate for three months, becoming close friends with both Sand and Chopin. The trio was devoted to art -- Delacroix and Chopin on the bohemian side, Sand on the aristocratic.

''The output of these three was incredible,'' says Felder. Sand's groundbreaking life was a model for how women could live and love. (She is also credited with being the first person to write about the female orgasm.) She survived as a working writer -- unprecedented for a woman in her day -- churning out 70 novels, 24 plays, and 40,000 letters.

''With a pen!'' Felder emphasizes. ''Not typing and sending e-mails.''

Earlier in the week, the troupe visited the Delacroix and Chopin gravesites at Pere Lachaise and studied period paintings in the Louvre and the Musee national Eugene Delacroix. They lurked in the Musee de la Vie Romantique where, in a nearby apartment, Sand and Chopin consummated their amorous affair. They gawked at Chopin's residences on Rue de la Chaussee d'Antin and Place Vendome. They paid him homage at the site of his funeral, La Madeleine and Place de La Concorde.

At Sand's chateau-cum-artist colony, about 150 miles south of Paris, they put in two days of rehearsals, did some sightseeing, and even ate the hearty food the 19th-century artistes might have dined on, some prepared directly from Sand's own recipes.

`Enormous music' Felder says the highlight was his recital of Chopin's funeral march, played on Sand's piano in the same salon where Chopin composed it.

Considered a piano virtuoso, the shy Chopin actually disliked playing in public. He preferred performing in private salons like the Chateau de Nohant's -- the imaginary setting of ''Romantique.''

Felder says the bond between Sand and the manic-depressive, perfectionist, ''a little wacko'' Chopin allowed him to explore the connection between melancholy and the act of creation.

''Chopin lived hard, died young, like Gershwin and Mozart,'' he says. ''Romanticism was complete self-expression of emotion, melody, color, line, form. It was not just roses and `I love you.' ''

The Polish-born musician died of tuberculosis in 1849 at 39.

''Despite his madness, he was able to produce so much,'' Felder says.

Naturally, Chopin's ''enormous music'' will be integral to the play. ''It was frightening to undertake,'' Felder says, disappearing into a back room.

''Lots of descriptions exist of how Chopin played,'' says scholar Jeffrey Kallberg, finishing Felder's thought. Kallberg is the author of ''Chopin at the Boundaries'' and a forthcoming book on the Chopin Nocturnes, the famous short compositions suggestive of nighttime calm.

Kallberg explains the concept of rubato, or robbed time, that Chopin pioneered: strict tempo temporarily loosened to give some notes more time to be played slowly. ''Stretching and condensing rhythm is something that modern pianists have forgotten.''

It is a technique that Felder, playing Chopin, will try to master.

Suddenly, Sand and Delacroix sweep in. Stephanie Zimbalist, best known for her stint on the 1980s TV show ''Remington Steele,'' and Anthony Crivello, who received a Tony Award for ''Kiss of the Spider Woman,'' have donned their sweltering costumes for a photo shoot.

''The play brings us back to a time when Sand broke a lot of barriers,'' says Zimbalist. ''In the Romantic age, it was a time to express yourself sexually, creatively. I think we are living in a more oppressive age today.'' Zimbalist doesn't much look like Sand, but with a wild black mop, Crivello might be Delacroix's brother. When Felder returns, wearing a blond pompadour wig, light blue vest, and white shirt, his resemblance to Chopin is striking.

Felder produces a stack of photocopies and distributes papers to those not already preoccupied with makeup or plates of food. It's a letter from Liszt to Chopin, saying, ''Madame Sand strongly desires to see you,'' that she lives at ''quai Malaquais 19,'' and would like to meet him at the Cafe d'Orsay, which just happens to be right down the street.

Outside, the city becomes calm. Trees waver in the heat. Beyond them, the shimmering Seine, and on the other bank, the Louvre.

In this pale yellow apartment adorned with antiques, Sand, Chopin, and Delacroix pose by the tall windows overlooking the river.

The past and present eerily intersect. An ephemeral moment. Then it dissipates into the wash of afternoon light.

When ''Romantique'' debuts, Felder hopes the cast and crew bring such moments back again.

''Romantique'' runs Aug. 1 - 17 at the American Repertory Theatre, 64 Brattle St., Cambridge. For tickets call 617-547-8300. For more information, go to www.amrep.org.

Arts Briefings

THEATER: IMAGINING CHOPIN First came "George Gershwin Alone." Now comes "Romantique," the second of the Canadian concert pianist and actor Hershey Felder's so-called imaginations with music. In a premiere opening tomorrow at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., this show turns to the world of the composer Frˇdˇric Chopin, the writer George Sand and the painter Eug¸ne Delacroix. Directed by Andrew Robinson and Joel Zwick ("My Big Fat Greek Wedding") and incorporating some of Chopin's most beloved compositions, "Romantique" unfolds on a summer evening in 1846 during the final visit to Sand's retreat outside Paris by Chopin, her longtime lover, and Delacroix. Mr. Felder plays Chopin; Stephanie Zimbalist is Sand, and Anthony Crivello is Delacroix. The show runs through Aug. 17.

'Romantique' notions

By Alexander Stevens/ Staff Writer

Wednesday, July 30, 2003
'Remington Steele' star Stephanie Zimbalist plays George Sand at ART

Even if you were a devout fan of the 1980s TV show "Remington Steele," you might not recognize Stephanie Zimbalist today.

She's grown out her hair and it's streaked with blonde highlights - a fashion statement that seems downright reckless compared with the dark, controlled tresses of Laura Holt, the button-down detective she played from 1982-'87. The appeal of Zimbalist's Laura was that she was both bright and beautiful, even if she realized that she needed a dashing male figurehead (Pierce Brosnan) in order to market her agency.

"I have a lot in common with her. I have worked all my life in a profession which has been male-dominated," says Zimbalist. "I don't think she wanted to be controlled by men, which I totally understand because I'm that way."

Zimbalist could be talking about Laura, the role that thrust her onto the national stage. But actually she's talking about her new role, the French writer George Sand, in "Romantique," Hershey Felder's new "imagination with music," playing Aug. 1-17 at the Loeb Drama Center in Cambridge.

Zimbalist, 46, sits in her spacious dressing room at the Loeb, occasionally stretching her legs, yoga-style, while she chats. Nine color Polaroid pictures are wedged into the metal frame of her mirror - shots of friends (including her "boyfriend") and family (including her father, actor Efrem Zimbalist Jr.). Her affection for her dad is quickly apparent. When asked, she describes their relationship as "very close," and even takes time to pitch his soon-to-be-released autobiography.

Zimbalist seems to share a no-nonsense quality with Laura Holt, but she tears up when asked about the protective, honoring way she seems to talk about her friends and mentors.

Accessing those emotions will probably help her work in "Romantique," in which writer-director-actor-pianist Hershey Felder, the hero behind the hit "George Gershwin Alone," muses on the tantalizing friendship between composer Frederic Chopin (Felder), writer George Sand (Zimbalist) and painter Eugene Delacroix (Anthony Crivello). The play is set during one weekend in the summer of 1846, when Sand is about to present a new, largely autobiographical play, which is likely to cause waves within the relationships.

Zimbalist says Sand's motivation is to let the men know that she's feeling lost.

"Artists have large egos and large imaginations," says Zimbalist, describing how the dynamic that made the Chopin-Sand-Delacroix friendship so exciting was also what threatened the relationship. "And if you think of [those egos] as balloons that fill up, it's hard to fit them into one room. People feel pressure, some take up more space, and other people feel they're being crowded out. So it's about the expansion and release of artistic tension."

That dynamic strikes to the heart of Sand - a nurturing, healing woman who had a knack for bringing together creative people. But she was also an artist in her own right. She may have nurtured Chopin through one of his most creative periods, but she also needed to express herself.

The show may concentrate on three dynamic artists, but Zimbalist says the real star of "Romantique" is Chopin's music.

"The music is the number one character in the play," she says. "The music carries any emotion that we want to express, need to express. It's very inspiring. It's evocative of the deepest wellings of the spirit."

She gives the credit not only to Chopin but also to Felder.

"Even if [the play] weren't going to be good - and it is [going to be good] - the fact that the actor who is playing Chopin can sit down and play Chopin beautifully, and does... that is so worth the price of the ticket, even if both Anthony and I were going to be lame."

But Zimbalist aims higher than "lame." She says she finds herself fighting for Sand in the piece, trying to wedge as many facets of the writer into the play as possible. Sand was clearly an intellectually and emotionally complex woman - a prolific writer, and a passionate, even reckless, lover.

But Zimbalist knows that Sand may get overshadowed by Chopin, pointing out that the production has an advisor who's a Chopin scholar, not one who's a Sand scholar. She says she fights, as best she can, for Sand.

"There's no way to have it all," says Zimbalist. "But I want to make sure she gets up on stage."

"Romantique" contains no singing - just the Chopin music - despite the fact that the cast is made up of three actors with strong voices. Zimbalist is a classically trained singer and actor. She studied at Juilliard, and like a long of list of other distinguished actors who studied at Juilliard, didn't graduate.

Still, she admits she drops the Juilliard name because of the reaction it gets.

"It's amazing what the Big J will do," she says. "Suddenly, you're not just a piece of crap television actress."

Although "Remington Steele" was her highest profile turn on television, it wasn't her only one. She also appeared in dozens of TV movies. She embraces her 'Remington Steele' past, with only the smallest of reservations.

"I am so grateful for it, because it made me solvent," she says. "That's such a hughly good thing. The only niche of a bad thing is that I can walk away from anything, because I don't need to do it. I mean, I don't live grandly at all, but I don't have to do [jobs] for the paycheck."

After the success of "Remington Steele," Zimbalist got a couple of offers for TV series, but decided against them.

"Only one that I turned down might have been a mistake - only for the bank account," she says. "Other than that, I made the right choices for myself."

"Romantique" plays Aug. 1-17 at the Loeb Drama Center, in Cambridge. Tickets are $45. Call 617-547-8300.

The notion of dreams coming true might seem a preposterous conceit in a more cynical era, yet "The Rainmaker," N. Richard Nash's unabashedly optimistic 1953 teleplay-turned-Broadway-hit, still has the power to keep disbelief at bay in Jenny Sullivan's affectingly staged revival for Ventura's Rubicon Theatre. Preceding "The Music Man" by three years, Nash's fable, about a traveling con man (Carlos Sanz) who lives only in his dreams and a lonely spinster (Stephanie Zimbalist) who lives entirely outside hers, shares some of the same fairy-tale appeal, sans trombones. In this case, trouble's capital T rhymes with D, which stands for "drought"--both meteorological and spiritual--as a family of Old West-style ranchers grapples with encroaching urbanization in the 1920s.

Director Sullivan and her first-rate cast add heightened gravitas with a tough-minded approach to the upheaval wrought by changing social values. In this regard, Zimbalist's bravura performance as Lizzie anchors the production with a letter-perfect portrait of a smart, independent-minded woman who can't live up to her community's traditional expectations.

Angry at being shopped around like a farm animal to potential husbands by her father and brothers, Lizzie's self-destructive resistance is comic and poignant at the same time.

Lizzie's complexity deepens with the appearance of Sanz's Starbuck, the drifter who offers to bring rain --for a fee, of course. Relying less on charisma and more on brooding mystery, Sanz delves beneath the charlatan to reveal the wounded dreamer who is as out of place in the world as Lizzie herself. Their beautifully played connection aches with a partiality that brings the fairy tale gracefully back to earth.

The supporting cast does a superb job in both defining its characters' strengths and limitations, and showing the healing wrought by Starbuck's influence. James O'Neil's Noah is the pragmatic elder brother enslaved to rationality, who finally realizes that in trying to keep his family from breaking its heart on what he considers foolishness, he has been demeaning and belittling them. Joseph Fuqua engenders cheers as his slow-speaking brother Jim, who sees more clearly with his heart than Noah sees with his head, but lacks the self-confidence to trust his own feelings.

Jeff Kober convincingly depicts the show's biggest stretch--the loner deputy who overcomes his own massive prejudices to buck the system and even his grizzled sheriff boss(Tony Perry). But the true catalyst for all these changes is not Starbuck, it's John Bennett Perry's sensitive portrayal as the rancher patriarch who seems to have lost his footing in the world with the loss of his wife, yet somehow recognizes that the obvious con man can supply the missing spark that will bring completeness to his struggling family.

Production values are excellent, from Pamela Shaw's sweat-stained costumes to Tom Giamario's elegant set, which squeezes three locales onto an intimate stage. After nearly half a century, "The Rainmaker" still makes a handsomely staged case for miracles.

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Cherry Orchard Reviews

From the beginning, there has been disagreement over how to stage Chekhov's plays. The playwright's great patron, Konstantin Stanislavsky, directed them as dramas at the Moscow Art Theater, while Chekhov insisted they were comedies.

An Odyssey Theatre Ensemble/Circus Theatricals production of "The Cherry Orchard" tries to honor Chekhov's wish. But comedy, as Chekhov wrote it, exists on a knife's edge between satiric silliness and immense sadness. Director Jack Stehlin and his cast blunder too often into broad comedy, which makes the characters seem merely ridiculous and their downfall pathetic rather than sorrowful.

The cast's two biggest names, Alfred Molina and Stephanie Zimbalist, deliver the most effective performances.

Molina is earnest but a bit arrogant as a successful businessman in early 1900s Russia who tries to divert a once-wealthy family--whose predecessors owned his father as a serf--from the calamity of seeing its country estate sold at auction to settle debts.

Playing the estate owner's adopted daughter and the property's caretaker, Zimbalist--tightly buttoned into her severely drab dresses--is the picture of repressed emotion.

As the estate owner, Jill Gascoine is so filled with the joy of living that it's almost easy to forgive her disastrous lack of practicality, while Greg Mullavey, playing her brother, is an overgrown child, veering between extremes of rapture and despair.

Mullavey is encouraged to play much too big at times, while actors in some of the smaller roles are sent still further--especially Gigi Bermingham (so excellent in the recent "Non-Vital Organs") as a governess whose attention-grabbing theatrics and shrill voice put one in mind of Megan Mullally's Karen on "Will & Grace."

"The Cherry Orchard" is a story about something important slipping through one's fingers, vanishing irretrievably into the past before it is even really gone. Unfortunately, that's exactly what happens to this production.

DARYL H. MILLER

Through Jul. 28
Sundays, 7 p.m.
Wednesdays, 8 p.m.
Thursdays, 8 p.m.
Fridays, 8 p.m.
Saturdays, 8 p.m.

Price: $23.50-$19.50
Tickets: Box office: 310-477-2055.

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An air of anticipation hangs over the doomed estate of Lyubov Andreyevna Ranevskaya. Those in the know can feel something coming even if the estate's residents and servants prefer to go about their lives in not-so-blissful ignorance.

Playwright Anton Chekhov was foreseeing the Russian Revolution, but in Jack Stehlin's production of Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard," the foreboding is unspecific. Only the upstart merchant Lopakhin (played by Alfred Molina) knows which way the wind is blowing, but nobody listens to him.

Making a lot out of a little and working with a crackerjack cast that 99-seat theaters can seldom muster, Stehlin's Circus Theatricals production -- a co-production with the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble -- is a "Cherry Orchard" worth savoring. Lacking the dreary self-pitying bitterness that infuses so many productions of Chekhov, Stehlin's crew makes the aches alive and vibrant. These tattered aristocrats may be going down, but they're exiting with champagne corks popping.

Consider the painful tongue-tied silence of Molina's Lopakhin as he tries to spit out a marriage proposal to Ranevskaya's adopted daughter, Varya (Stephanie Zimbalist). For that matter, look at Zimbalist practically imploding in despair when Lopakhin's words don't come. Or take in the boundless joy of landowner Pishchik (Paul Taylor Robinson) as he pays off a fraction of his debts before running off for someone else's estate, gushing, "I owe money to everybody!" These scenes take place quite late in the play, but there's much that comes before.

Ranevskaya (Jill Gascoine) has returned after several years abroad, her finances squandered and her estate and famed cherry orchards about to hit the auction block. Returning with Ranevskaya is her slightly infantile brother Gayev (Greg Mullavey) and daughter Anya (Nikella Dee). The servants are all either ancient, lazy or somewhat on the take.

Newly rich Lopakhin, whose peasant ancestors were slaves on the estate, has a plan to save the family's bacon, if somebody will just give him the OK to execute it. Meanwhile, Anya is romanced halfheartedly by student Petya (Andy Comeau). The auction, and by extension the family's fate, is days away.

Jaret Sacrey's set design makes better than efficient use of three transparent screens behind which characters dance, exit or chase each other around. A few pieces of furniture re-create the estate's nursery in the opening scene, and scenic projections evoke the orchard, train journeys, land holdings, etc. The overall color scheme is a light burgundy.

Gascoine and Mullavey both convey the family blindness, albeit in quite different ways. With their uncomprehending stares and zest for the life that is dwindling away, both suggest a kind of madness. Molina's Lopakhin, by contrast, is the sharpest of realists. To the actor's credit -- and his director's -- Lopakhin doesn't crow or rub his victory in people's faces. He's still, one suspects, a little ill at ease in his gentry finery.

Part of me will always wonder at those who label Chekhov's plays comedies. There may well be something humorous about these aimless, largely pathetic people. Stehlin and company find the laughs. More important, they locate a heart.

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