Ethan Coen’s Broadway Play Lost an Actor to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Movie

If Fred Melamed is still “trying to bring the pompous, Jewish, overweight, Rabbinic figure back to the center of American sexuality,” he’ll have to do it without Talking Cure, the Ethan Coen one-act from Relatively Speaking, opening October 20. Melamed, who had previously worked with the CoBros for his role in A Serious Man, walked out of the show after a matinee this week. He first cited an overriding commitment to Sacha Baron Cohen’s The Director, but now he’s divulging further details on his split with Coen: “We kind of weren’t together on the character. There were things Ethan wanted that I didn’t like, that seemed to take the character in a direction that felt artificial. Stuff I couldn’t really make sense of.” If only more actors had done this on the set of The Ladykillers! [ArtsBeat/NYT]