Carol Lawrence. Broadway debut 1952. Tony nominee in ’57 as Maria in B’way’s original “West Side Story.” Triple divorcee. Two children by husband Robert Goulet. Opens Sunday in the Westside Theatre’s “Handle With Care.” So where she been all this time?
“Raising my sons in LA. I’m now a grandma. My granddaughter’s 4. And I miss everything I did 100 years ago. California’s not for me. No tingle out there. Over 18, they won’t look at you. They toss your photos without even opening them.
“I moved back here in June. I’m in my West Side co-op with Cara Mia, my King Charles Spaniel whom I walk and love. The name’s Italian because I’m Italian.”
Although she’s done TV and regional productions, how’s it feel being on a NY stage again?
“Scared stiff. Nervous making. You wonder, ‘Have I strength to deliver eight performances a week?’ Risking the world’s sharpest audiences and toughest critics? And the pace is different. We broke in ‘West Side Story’ on the road two months. Now, one week of previews and we open. I’m used to a larger theater and not used to today’s high promotional super electronics. You need a degree to survive the terminology and abbreviations and every minute being blasted on Twitter and Facebook.
“I’m surviving by praying a lot. Backstage our encouraging, boosting company of four does a group hug. The warm romantic comedy’s about a nebbish little woman whose nose is into everything. It’s set Christmas Eve, but the play’s not seasonal. There’s Hebrew in it.
“The year-round message is ‘Love will win out.’ ”
How long will it run?
“Long as we can.”
Odds & ends
What you did for the holiday season, I don’t know. What Marsha Mason did, I know. Showed pals the Amsterdam Avenue locale of “The Goodbye Girl” apartment . . . You should also know, although it doesn’t come up often in conversation, that if you bump into Greg Kinnear, he speaks fluent Greek . . . Also that Tony Bennett can’t drive . . . Also that allergic Reese Witherspoon breaks out if she comes in contact with gold . . . Also, should it pop up in conversation, Emmy Rossum signed as the new face of Restorsea, a skincare company.
Leo + Claire’s chemistry
So, all the stories about swordsplayer DiCaprio? In their 1996 film “Romeo + Juliet,” I hear that Claire Danes admits “definitely a spark between us but neither of us knew how to handle it. Too big to actually accept so we sometimes ignored each other . . . In a mornning-after bedroom scene the first day of shooting we both wore tiny G-strings under the sheets. Leo squirmed all over. I, stoic, tried to breathe and just get through it.”
Hotel redo
West 23rd Street’s landmarked Chelsea Hotel, born 1880-ish, closed in 2011 for fumigating. Its historic 250 rooms — where Dylan Thomas died of pneumonia, The Sex Pistols girlfriend Nancy Spungen was stabbed to death, which housed Warholniks, types like Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, Iggy Pop and others of such social standing — got sold for $80 mil and is in the process of being juiced up.
New décor’s partly by Carol Horn, who once designed sweaters and now crafts jewelry for Anthropologie and handpaints artistic fabric. Yards of her colorful fabric are being fashioned into hotel furniture. Not exactly what used to be in the rooms of the old days.
Fifth Avenue. Near St. Pat’s. Two blond Midwesternish tourists asked a passerby to take their picture. One Barbie handed over her iPhone. The stranger told them to take a few steps back, then a few more, then a few more. He then ran off. Ten feet away he turned around, laughed, snapped their photo, handed back the iPhone and warned them: “You need to be careful in this city.”
Only in New York, kids, only in New York.