Tattle Tales

WELL, I FINALLY MADE IT: To the triple Tony Award-winning hit, "Copenhagen," at the Royale Theatre, I mean. The stirring drama by Michael Frayn, one of the most successful plays of the past decade in London, where in 1998 it won the prestigious Evening Standard award for best play. Since its Broadway premiere this past Apr. 11, it has duplicated the British success by winning three major Tony Awards. Those were: Best Play Best Director (Michael Blakemore) and Best Featured Actress (Blair Brown). Result has been sell-out business ever since, which is why I wasn’t able to land two on the aisle until the play’s sixth month on Broadway. Whatever, it was well worth the wait to see Philip Bosco ("Broadway’s finest classical actor" according to Liz Smith) his co-stars, Brown and Michael Cumpsty, in the three leads. Making the performance even more auspicious for me was that Bosco last month celebrated his 70th birthday. Yes, at that age and after roles on Broadway in more than 100 shows over the past half century, Bosco is still able to keep an audience mesmerized every night.

Adding verisimilitude to Bosco’s fine performance and to the appeal of the play is that it draws its inspiration from actual events which have intrigued and baffled historians for over 50 years. The first was in 1941 when Germany ruled Europe, including Denmark, and had designs on the U.S.A. That was when German physicist Werner Heisenberg (Cumpsty) secretly visited in Copenhagen his Danish counterpart Niels Bohr (Bosco), who, like him, had been working on development of the atom bomb. The half-Jewish Bohr, however, had no intention of aiding Heisenberg in developing an atom bomb for Adolf Hitler. Helping Bohr come to that decision was his strong-willed wife Margrethe (Brown). Which poses the interesting question what if Bohr had indeed collaborated with Heisenberg on producing such a bomb, and had chosen instead to travel to America to contribute his immense nuclear knowledge to the Manhattan Project? Would we still have atom bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Other pivotal questions are: Why did Heisenberg go to Denmark, what did he and Bohr say to each other, and what was the defining moment of their meeting that was so important to the nuclear age? Would’ve, could’ve should’ve—phrases that don’t make for compelling drama, but which in the case of the play "Copenhagen," do. Also of considerable help is the masterful staging by Michael Blakemore, who did the same for the London production.