A Pair of Jokers

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BRODERICK: [Singing] Bum bum bum ... [as an eerily accurate Martin] I'm playing golf, man. Don't call me now, I'm playing golf. [Lane is helpless with laughter. And possibly Vicodin.] We're not quite at that level perhaps.

LANE: Martin and Lewis, you know, they were like rock stars. We're just two actors.

BRODERICK: You could also compare us to Bob Hope and, ah ... [He cracks up.]

LANE: [Skeptically] And Bing Crosby?

BRODERICK: Yeah!

LANE: How? I don't think we're anything like them.

BRODERICK: [Singing again] Bum bum-a-dum, bum bum bum ...

LANE: You just keep doing that. You just did that as Dean Martin a minute ago.

BRODERICK: No, that was [as Martin again], Don't call me on the golf course, man. Leave me alone, Jerry.

You'd think they'd be sick of each other, but they actually hang out offstage too. "We've always been friends," Broderick says. "We've had little arguments, very brief moments of temper or whatever, but so little. During this rehearsal process, when we get our little hour-and-a-half break, we go somewhere and eat. And go out after." There are joint excursions to the Hamptons. They have a whole circle of friends in common, including Parker and Lane's steady boyfriend as well as Alias actor (and Broadway veteran) Victor Garber. "Nathan is as much a part of our extended family as life allows," says Parker, who calls her husband's partner Uncle Nathan around son James Wilkie. "That's a huge part of life in the theater, the time after the show. They're both far more social than I am." Parker also maintains that The Odd Couple has reversed their real-life personas. "Matthew is far more like Oscar than Felix."

That may be, but there's a sense in which The Odd Couple tells their story, the story of two men who make each other better. As Oscar, the horndog sportswriter with a beer gut and a backward baseball cap, Lane learns a little discipline--he literally cleans up his act. And when he stands over Felix, yelling at him, begging him to let himself go, to cut loose, that could just as easily be Lane pushing Broderick. Or to put it another way, just as the shyster Max gets Leo to say in The Producers, "There's a lot more to me than there is to me." --With reporting by Lina Lofaro and Carolina A. Miranda