BROADWAY RECALL: Langella Loves New York

Welcome to BROADWAY RECALL, a bi-monthly column where BroadwayWorld.com's Chief Theatre Critic, Michael Dale, delves into the archives and explores the stories behind the well-known and the not so well-known videos and photographs of Broadway's past. Look for BROADWAY RECALL every other Saturday.

Though he's had his share of screen success throughout his busy career, Frank Langella has been a steady fixture of the New York stage since winning a 1965 Obie Award for his performance in John Webster's 1612 drama The White Devil and making his Broadway debut the next year in Frederico Garcia Lorca Yerma.

His first of three Tony Awards came in 1975 for playing a human-size talking lizard in Edward Albee's Seascape. He's now previewing in Terence Rattigan's Man and Boy, which will be his seventeenth Broadway outing. That doesn't count his one stint on the musical stage, playing Scrooge in the Madison Square Garden product of A Christmas Carol. (Langella is pictured with Nick Jonas, who was making his professional debut as Young Scrooge and Tiny Tim at the age of eight.)

The latter part of Frank Langella's career has seen him truly establish himself as one of the great stage actors of our time. Here he is in 2008 as Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons:

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The previous year, his remarkably true-to-life performance in Frost/Nixon earned him a Tony for playing one of the most complex figures in American history.

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But it was playing the title role in the 1977 revival of Dracula that helped him make the transition from working actor to Broadway star, and like so many Broadway success stories of the 1970s, television had something to do with it.

Ever since Bob Fosse had the idea to make a commercial out of a minute's worth of Pippin, TV ads were working wonders for Broadway box offices, exposing shows to a large pool of potential ticket buyers who weren't especially familiar with live theatre. When the New York State Board of Tourism, which had been using its "I Love New York" jingle to promote vacationing throughout the state, put out the first of its minute-long spots promoting Broadway, it featured the casts of A Chorus Line, The Wiz, Grease, The King and I, Annie, The Magic Show and even a shot of Hume Cronyn and Jessica Tandy in The Gin Game. But it was Frank Langella, with his chillingly sexy delivery of the commercial's tag line, that stole the show and had visitors from around the country dying to spend an evening with the count.

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