Report From Seattle: Why ‘Lone Star Love’ Got Canceled Before Its Broadway Run

The bad part about being a theatergoer in Seattle, where the pre-Broadway productions come to work their kinks out, is that you have to put up with the bad kinks — usually overlong everything. The good part is getting to see the hilarious kinks — like Randy Quaid grinding lustily around the stage with a bulging codpiece and magenta hair. That’s one vision New Yorkers will have to live without, since Lone Star Love’s Broadway run, at the Belasco Theatre, has been canned.

“I can’t go into it,� says Fifth Avenue PR person Molly Fortin. And she really wouldn’t go into it, not even a little bit. Financial problems? Infighting? Rehab? “I can’t go into it.�

This morning Quaid asked the New York Times, “How do you take a fornicator, an adulterer, an alcoholic and an identity thief and make a family show around him?� Seemingly contradicting her husband, his wife/manager Evi Quaid told the New York Post, “Frankly, we did want to take it in a more surreal direction… This is Shakespeare. It’s not supposed to be whitewashed.�

Theater gossips in Seattle say that level of confusion has bedeviled the entire production. Reportedly, Quaid and his wife/manager have been battling with New York producers over general “creative control,� but the talk in Seattle is all about Quaid — from how lewdly he should play Colonel John Falstaff (his performances have allegedly veered from restrained to orgiastic) to the size of his crotch bulge.

Despite the uniform excellence of 2004’s Off-Broadway production, West Coast reviewers are almost unanimous in condemning Lone Star Love as much ado about nothing. Perhaps in canceling Randy Quaid’s Broadway debut, the Belasco has saved itself a fiasco. —Brendan Kiley