Celebrity Gossip / By Liz Smith
Streep sings superbly
Updated: 07/11/08 6:37 AM
“I CAN sing better than she can. If Madonna gets it (the lead role in “Evita”) I’ll rip her throat out,” said Meryl Streep back in 1996.
Speaking of singing, Christine Baranski will depart the Longacre Theater after the matinee of “Boeing Boeing” and step onto Jeff Zucker’s GE helicopter. That will land her in Southampton in time for the gala Hamptons premiere of the new big hit movie musical “Mamma Mia!”
Although the star of the film, Meryl Streep, won’t be attending — her co-star, the handsome Pierce Brosnan will join Ms. Baranski for this exclusive event honoring Evelyn Lauder and her Breast Cancer Foundation. Forget about the guest list; it’s stellar and how the small Southampton movie theater will accommodate all this high power, I don’t know.
But it’s happening: (Another Peggy Siegal PR production). And while I’m at it, what’s with our so-called competition at The Daily Snooze? Their reporter Jim Farber writes about Meryl and Christine and their singing in “Mamma Mia!” as if they are mere ordinary mortals doing karaoke. He refers to the singing of these two stars as “spirited amateurism.”
Both Meryl and Christine are accomplished singers. Acting aside, Christine starred as the lead in a recent Washington production of “Mame” and Meryl had early ambitions for opera. She plays the violin and uses classical music to help her get into character for roles. She sang in the musicals “Happy End” and “Alice at the Palace” and also scored recording songs from the musical “Hair” and the Grammynominated “Philadelphia Chickens.” She played a professional singer in “A Prairie Home Companion” and has also sung in many of her films such as “Silkwood,” “Ironweed,” “Death Becomes Her,” “Dancing at Lughnasa.” She belted out Brecht in Central Park’s 2006’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” She was tremendous singing in the film “Postcards from the Edge.”
Farber seems to feel Christine and Meryl are actors who stoop to sing in this lively feast of ABBA tunes, something in the manner of Rex Harrison’s recitative in “My Fair Lady.” The reporter is complimentary of them in a way he shouldn’t be. Both these stars can really sing. They didn’t need any help from what he calls “tweaking.”
CBS “60 Minutes” ace Lesley Stahl, and the Times’ columnist Gail Collins, have an extensive interview about the problems of expectant first ladies on the wowowow. com site. Here is just a fascinating fragment of what Gail says about Bill Clinton as a potential “first lady.”
Gail: “I did wonder, during the primaries, when everyone was getting so bent out of shape about Bill Clinton running amuck, that this must be that his heart surgery made him a new, strange, crazy person. There was just all this kind of speculation about why he was behaving in such an erratic fashion. I think it was just an alpha guy trying to deal with the role of first lady, which as you said, is a horrible role that requires so much self-control and so much humility and stomping on your own personality. It’s a very, very difficult thing to do. And, clearly, he’s not really a person that’s going to be able to do it all that well.”
As we know now — Bill isn’t going to have to cram around. But the reporters mentioned above have a lot more to say about the problems facing Michelle Obama and Cindy McCain in the future.
Speaking again of the film “Mamma Mia!,” let’s note that the British press already called it “the only feel good factor in this summer of credit crunch blues.” They noted that even Queen Elizabeth II says: “I always try to dance when ’Dancing Queen’ comes on because I am the queen and I like to dance.”
