The stage star outshined

NEW YORK —  Here is a complaint I’m not sure I want to file. Let’s call it an observation instead. Or, wimping out entirely on the issue, we’ll call it a query.

What gives suddenly with Hollywood stars and musicals? Inside every movie and TV actor is there an inner Merman screaming to get out? Has every screen star who played in “Peter Pan” in grade school remembered that long ago in drama school there were three audition songs and a pair of tap shoes in the closet?

And while we’re asking, how many of the moonlighting movie stars would be on Broadway now if they had to sing without a mike -- or if they had to dance in a movie without a virtuosic editor?

Really, I am as delighted as anyone this side of Melanie Griffith that Antonio Banderas made his Broadway debut in the revival of the musical “Nine.” I am as blown away as the next “Chicago” zealot by the musical charms and skills of Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones and the rest of the casting surprises in the Oscar-winning musical. And I am delighted to see that fine dramatic actress Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio back on stage after such memorable movie detours as “Scarface” and “The Color of Money.” But what is she -- one of the few Americans with a deep understanding of Shakespeare -- doing as Aldonza, the singing, dancing harlot in the current revival of “Man of La Mancha”?

One answer is that she’s not embarrassing herself. Much like Mary Stuart Masterson, who went from off-Broadway drama to Hollywood and elegantly back on Broadway as Banderas’ long-suffering wife in “Nine,” Mastrantonio is bringing all the style and conscientious professionalism to a genre to which she has not devoted her whole life.

But someone has to ask: What about the artists who have worked their entire careers for a chance at one of the handful of musical roles?

I hasten to proclaim that I’m not the theater sort who resents and rejects the appearance of movie and TV actors on Broadway. I don’t think that most of them think they’re slumming or believe they’re all just there for an easy bump of respectability in the revolving doors of some long-running shows.

I regret that, unlike London, we are geographically impaired in this country, forcing actors to choose between screen careers in Los Angeles and theater in New York.

But the actors have chosen. And the ones who wanted -- no, who needed -- to be in musicals are the ones who stayed in New York.

It is hard not to worry about the remarkable people whose voices change the way we listen or whose movements transform the way we see. Earlier this season, Playwrights Horizons opened its new off-Broadway theater with three weekends of semi-staged revivals of three favorite musicals. Aside from the pleasure and the nostalgia, there was the nagging realization of how little these gifted musical specialists have been allowed to show what they do.

From the 1981 and 1990 editions of “Falsettos,” there were Michael Rupert, Chip Zien, Heather MacRae, Alison Fraser and, though she works a lot, the chronically misused Faith Prince. How could anyone sit through “Violet,” from 1997, and not wonder why Lauren Ward is not at the top of every A-list casting call? Where has Romain Fruge been since he starred in “Floyd Collins” in 1996?

When musicals mattered, artists were nurtured from show to show. Now we think: Hey, that’s not bad for a movie star. The box office may enjoy the kick of screen iconography. I can too. But unless Broadway starts using what it has, audiences may never know what they missed.

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Linda Winer is chief theater critic at Newsday, a Tribune company.