Theater Talkback: The Season of the Sputtering Starlet

From left, Stephen Lovekin/Getty Images; Thibault Camus/Associated Press; Damon Winter/The New York Times From left: Katie Holmes, Jessica Chastain and Scarlett Johansson.

The geese who fly east from Hollywood on an annual basis, looking for a little Broadway luster to boost their showbiz stock, aren’t laying as many golden eggs as they normally do this season. As Patrick Healy noted recently, the box office at the Richard Rodgers Theater, where Scarlett Johansson is starring in a revival of “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” has not exactly been inundated since the show opened to middling reviews in January. Nor did Katie Holmes’s ballyhooed return to Broadway after a tumultuous few years as constant tabloid fodder do much for “Dead Accounts,” the Theresa Rebeck play that closed quickly in the fall after opening to sour reviews and sluggish ticket sales.

Call it the season of the sputtering starlet. Jessica Chastain’s starring performance in the fall revival of “The Heiress” helped that show to achieve reasonable returns at the box office - it recouped its investment before closing â€" but her dismayingly nuance-free performance as the oppressed Catherine Sloper ranks as one of the most regrettable star turns I’ve seen on Broadway in years.

Or at least it did until I saw Emilia Clarke’s strained Holly Golightly in the numbing stage adaptation of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” the other night. Ms. Clarke was obviously cast because she’s a star of the hot HBO series “Game of Thrones.” But, like Ms. Chastain, she seemed sadly deficient in stage technique, and gave a performance so arch that she didn’t merely seem to be playing a little girl lost; she seemed truly to be at sea on stage, and was more or less swallowed up in the busy emptiness of Sean Mathias’s listless production.

It’s never fun to see talented actors losing their bearings when they are miscast or misdirected onstage. But might there be some sort of silver lining here An end to the cynical gold-digging that has producers recklessly shoehorning stars into any conceivable vehicle Maybe the lackluster returns for these star-driven production might awaken Broadway producers to the signal fact that merely signing up a celebrity does not qualify as an intelligent or profitable business strategy in the theater.

Paul Hawthorne/Getty Images Julia Roberts, center, with Paul Rudd, left, and Bradley Cooper during the opening night curtain call of the Broadway play “Three Days of Rain” in 2006.

For quite a while it seemed as if it did: although Nicole Kidman was more game than truly accomplished in “The Blue Room,” the David Hare play was one of the hotter tickets on Broadway that season. The Broadway debut of Julia Roberts, in a revival of Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain,” similarly caused a downpour at the box office, despite her own effortful but undistinguished performance. But it may be that celebrity visits to Broadway have now become so commonplace that ticket-buyers are no longer leaping to their phones (or computers) to snag tickets whenever they see a familiar name on a marquee.

Of course this micro-trend may soon be reversed, and it’s worth noting that a star of sufficient magnitude can ride out even scathing reviews and other bad press, as Al Pacino did this season in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”And at least three more shows headlining major stars are still to come: the Nora Ephron play “Lucky Guy,” with the ever-likable Tom Hanks; “Orphans,” starring Alec Baldwin; and “I’ll Eat You Last,” with Bette Midler portraying the voracious Hollywood agent Sue Mengers. Should these shows burn up the box office - “Lucky Guy” has already racked up a strong advance - there’s little chance that the steady stream of ill-conceived (or not) celebrity-driven production will abate any time soon.

In fact the Broadway landscape as it is currently constituted will probably continue to make way for any big name of sufficient wattage, no matter how mismatched role and actor may be. If Jennifer Lawrence, Hollywood’s Oscar-winning “it” girl of the moment, decided she wanted to make her stage debut as Lady Macbeth, or Hedda Gabler, or Anne Frank for that matter, producers would surely be elbowing each other out of the way to clamber aboard.

Still, I can dream, can’t I

Please share your thoughts on this starlet-spangled season, or whether star casting has become more reckless and indiscriminate lately.