Celebs drive Broadway and Off-Broadway

"If you had spent more time on the plot, you may have landed a celebrity."

This is the only line that stuck with me after 21/2 hours of "The Atmosphere of Memory," the mind-bogglingly inept new play that recently opened the Labyrinth Theater Company's hip 99-seat home in the far west end of Greenwich Village.

Until the Lab made its smash Broadway debut last season with Stephen Adly Guirgis' audacious and unprintable "The -- With the Hat," the Lab was most famous as the troupe formerly co-directed by ongoing company member Philip Seymour Hoffman. The creative collective, which has done adventurous work for years at the Public Theater, has more than earned this distinctive place of its own.

The bizarre part of its inaugural choice is not just the awfulness of David Bar Katz's script about a playwright who cast his own mother in his tasteless autobiographical drama. At least as strange is finding Ellen Burstyn -- Tony-, Emmy- and Oscar-winning artist and Lab member -- lavishing all her seasoned and subtle gifts on the shallow monster of a mother.

Clearly, "landing a celebrity" is not just a Broadway obsession -- even obligation -- in our economically shaky and star-struck times.

Tonya Pinkins, a Tony winner for "Jelly's Last Jam" and celebrated in "Caroline, or Change," is giving a flinty, fierce performance in the lamentably small role of the mother in a promising beginner of a play, "Milk Like Sugar." Written by Kirsten Greenidge, this co-production of Playwrights Horizons, the Women's Project and the La Jolla Playhouse is an earnest, familiar, coming-of-age study of good and bad influences on a young black girl in a pregnancy pact with her friends.

Meanwhile, on Broadway, a bigger star system is so firmly entrenched that "whom have you got?" is at least as important a producing question as "what have you got?"

It is hard to imagine that "The Mountaintop" would be the box-office success it is now if not for the huge draw of Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett. Although I was captivated by Katori Hall's two-character historical fiction about Martin Luther King Jr. and a mysterious motel maid on the night before he was assassinated, a number of my colleagues were disappointed.

Given the relative anonymity of the playwright and the risky nature of irreverent material about an icon, stars were obviously important. As co-producer Sonia Friedman puts it, "The material itself is always the most important ingredient," though the combination of Jackson and Bassett "certainly entices investors and ticket buyers."

That enticement led to an extension, until Jan. 22, when Jackson has to leave to make a movie. Producers are weighing the possibility of recasting him, or bringing in a temporary replacement until Jackson finishes filming. There is also talk about a live HD cinemacast and/or a "Mountaintop" movie.

What might be the season's most hurtful fallout of the star system involves the cancellation of "Funny Girl." The much-anticipated revival, booked for a theater and an April opening, abruptly shut down last week when four major investors dropped out, citing the economy. A spokesman for the show adamantly denies that the casting of Lauren Ambrose as Fanny Brice has anything to do with the decision.

Still, it is impossible to ignore theater speculation that Ambrose -- the wonderful actress who was Claire in "Six Feet Under" and a terrific Juliet in Central Park -- may not be a big-enough name to attract tourists to a show identified with Barbra Streisand. Given this climate, I wonder if Streisand, then a relative unknown, could have been cast today.

Right now, Broadway's conspicuous exception to star casting is the star-is-born role being played by Nina Arianda in "Venus in Fur" -- a breakthrough performance that has been compared to Streisand's. Unlike a big-budget musical revival such as "Funny Girl," however, "Venus in Fur" is a modest production with two actors and already proved its wow-value Off-Broadway.

Still, I'm guessing that the oft-seen "Private Lives" would not be opening Thursday if Kim Cattrall (Samantha in "Sex and the City") were not starring. And it is unlikely that Theresa Rebeck's "Seminar" would be having its world premiere opening next Sunday without the identifiable menace of Alan Rickman (the teacher of potions in "Harry Potter") on the marquee.

Stars are nothing new in the theater, of course. But the economy got scary around the same time that the theater became an attractive destination for high-profile TV and movie actors eager to sign on for limited runs. By the 2009-10 season, when Liev Schreiber and Scarlett Johansson triumphed in "A View From the Bridge" and Denzel Washington led "Fences" to several Tonys, the trend began to look like a necessity.

The alchemy is not always box-office magic. Consider Patrick Stewart and T.R. Knight in the short-lived "A Life in the Theater." And ever since "The Producers" suffered when Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick left the show, producers are often wary of having their shows too closely identified as star vehicles. A little show called "The Book of Mormon" has managed to carve out a place for itself with only its "South Park" creators as stars.

Still, it is a brave producer who dares Broadway without identifiable casting. Frank Wildhorn's musical adaptation of "Bonnie & Clyde" opens Dec. 1 without even trying to compete with Warren Beatty-Faye Dunaway headliners. Also pretty daring, perhaps, is "Stick Fly," Lydia R. Diamond's drama about an affluent black family that opens Dec. 8 with a highly credentialed cast (including Ruben Santiago-Hudson and Dulé Hill), but nobody with Washington's marquee certainty.

" 'Stick Fly' is an ensemble play and as such needs ensemble casting," says the production's veteran producer Nelle Nugent, adding that this "brilliant play has had successful productions at some of the most prestigious regional theaters in the country." Besides, "our cast members . . . are well known to TV, film and stage audiences." And Grammy-winning singer-composer Alicia Keys believes so strongly in the play that she wrote incidental music for it and is co-producing.

Nugent compares Keys' impact to having Oprah Winfrey's name as producer on "The Color Purple." This, obviously, cannot hurt.