Show Business: The Long Way to Broadway

Her film career becalmed, Liz Taylor soars onstage

Ordinarily, conversation stops when a curtain goes up. But there is nothing ordinary about the current revival of The Little Foxes, and when the lights dim, audiences begin to buzz, like crickets waiting for dusk. "Where is she? How does she look? Has she lost weight?" Only when she has been onstage for five or ten minutes, do the whispers stop and the answers become clear: in her first stage role, Elizabeth Taylor looks beautiful, gorgeous, radiant. In a word, sensational. "I'm on a high," she admits. "I have a sense of accomplishment, a feeling of doing something useful in my life." Raising her shoulders in a kind of happy shiver, she adds: "And the applause is wonderful!"

Like a monarch, that earlier Elizabeth perhaps, she has been making her triumphal progress up the East Coast, with waves of that wonderful applause echoing in her ears. Fort Lauderdale's Parker Playhouse, where the production began Feb. 27, was sold out for three weeks. Washington's Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center has been booked for six weeks, and when the play opened there last Thursday, much of the Government, including President Reagan and Vice President Bush, were out front. There were three curtain calls, and Reagan and his wife Nancy went backstage to congratulate the cast and the star.*

The same happy scenario seems likely to be followed on Broadway, where the opening is May 7. The night after an ad appeared in the New York Times, a line began forming outside the Martin Beck Theater; before the week was out nearly $1 million worth of tickets had been sold. Producer Zev Bufman was already making plans to extend the New York run through Labor Day, nine weeks past the previously scheduled July 4 closing date, then take the production to New Orleans, Los Angeles and possibly London as well. "She's the hottest draw I've ever seen!" he exulted. "The tension is building. It's as if every night is an opening." Even Playwright Lillian Hellman, who had refused to allow her Foxes to come to Broadway with other stars, has joined the Taylor fan club. "I've turned down a great many offers before this one," she says. "But Elizabeth is the right person at the right age at the right time."

For Taylor, 49, the character of Regina Giddens, the turn-of-the-century Southern beauty, is also the right role at the right age at the right time. Foxes may be a turning point in her career, propelling her toward the stage rather than the screen. After 58 movies in 39 years, her film career seems to be becalmed, if not begone. In the past ten years many of her pictures, from X Y & Zee to The Mirror Crack 'd, have sunk from sight with little more than a gurgle of wasted dollars.