from TheaterMania.com
May 25, 2000
by Charles Wright
Amid the café tables that lend a nightclub ambience to Sam Mendes’ revisionist production of Cabaret at Studio 54, the Theatre World Foundation honored 13 talented “newcomers” in a 70-minute ceremony on Thursday afternoon, May 23. The annual Theatre World Awards, inaugurated 56 years ago by John Willis, recognize outstanding work by performers making their New York theater debuts, on Broadway or Off-Broadway, during a given season. (The season runs from June 1 to the following May 31.)
A distinguished group of past Theatre World Awards recipients, including Eli Wallach, Jane Alexander, and Eileen Heckart, presented bronze statuettes of the Roman god Janus to this year’s honorees, whose names had been announced on May 9. The afternoon’s most touching moment came when Rosemary Harris, now on Broadway in Noël Coward’s Waiting in the Wings, introduced her daughter, Jennifer Ehle, who is starring in Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing. “There’s a misconception that Jennifer is English,” Harris remarked. “She was born and raised in North Carolina and has spent the better part of her life in America.” This may be so, but as Ehle accepted a statuette from her mother, she said “thank you, mum,” in tones that evoked an English public school. As mother and daughter embraced, the audience of actors, journalists, press agents, and supporters from winners’ shows united in a spirited, sentimental ovation.
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