Multitask masters Grey, Rees and Mantello

Actors perform. Directors stage shows. Sometimes, playwrights direct their own plays, a perilous situation when creative differences arise. And, every so often, directors star in their own productions -- a holdover from a 19th century actor-manager system in which actors created, ran and appeared in their own companies.

But what we have right now is another form of multitasking altogether. Three artists are both acting and directing, each in separate and very different high-profile projects, all in the next few weeks.

As we speak, Joel Grey is playing Moonface Martin, song-and-dance gangster, in a revival of Cole Porter's 1934 high-seas frolic, "Anything Goes" (opening April 7 at the Roundabout Theatre Company's Stephen Sondheim Theatre, 124 W. 43rd St.).

MEANWHILE, he is also directing the 25th anniversary revival -- and Broadway premiere -- of Larry Kramer's furious, groundbreaking AIDS howl, "The Normal Heart" (opening April 27 at the Golden Theatre, 252 W. 45th St.). Director George C. Wolfe will be assisting, without billing, on "The Normal Heart" while Grey bounces between both shows and a major exhibit of his photographs at the Museum of the City of New York.

Exhibit two: Joe Mantello. With his staging of John Robin Baitz's wonderful "Other Desert Cities" already a treasure at the Lincoln Center Theater, Mantello is downtown directing Laurie Metcalf in "The Other Place," the world premiere of Sharr White's hallucinatory mystery about a research doctor at a conference (opening March 28 by MCC Theater at the Lucille Lortel Theatre, 121 Christopher St.).

MEANWHILE, he is preparing to star as Ned Weeks, Kramer's autobiographical stand-in in "The Normal Heart." Mantello hasn't been onstage since 1994, when he ended almost three grueling, extraordinary years inhabiting Louis, the wildly articulate anti-hero in the original seven-hour, two-play production of Tony Kushner's "Angels in America." Daryl Roth, producer of both "The Normal Heart" on Broadway and a celebrated one-night benefit reading last October, says, "Over the years, I've watched Joe grow into the amazing director he has become and, yet, always wished he would act again." When she heard he would be in the benefit, "it made my heart soar . . . one of the incentives for moving beyond the reading was knowing that Joe would make a commitment to this production, because he shared my passion for this play."

And then we have Roger Rees, the elegant and witty Welsh-born, Shakespeare-bred American who has co-directed "Peter and the Starcatcher," a prequel to "Peter Pan," at New York Theatre Workshop (79 E. Fourth St.).

MEANWHILE, Rees begins performances Tuesday as the unlikely replacement for Nathan Lane in "The Addams Family." The Tony-winning star of "Nicholas Nickleby" (1981), and recent replacement for Patrick Stewart in "Waiting for Godot" in London, will play Gomez to Bebe Neuwirth's definitively gorgeous Morticia in the musical that opened last spring. Rees has known her since their "Cheers" years (he played Kirstie Alley's millionaire boyfriend) and directed Neuwirth Off-Broadway in a sultry Kurt Weill solo showcase, "Here Lies Jenny."

Rees, in fact, is the only one of our three who has regularly toggled between performing and directing, including three years (2004-'07) as artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival. As he puts it, "The director must have the answers, but the actor gets to ask the questions. The director stands anonymous in shadow, at the back of the theater. The actor stands naked in bright light, before the audience." Speaking from both sides of the divide, he adds, "The eyes that, as director, gaze outward to behold the world entire can now, as actor, turn inward and snuggle up on the cozy sofa of one lovely, manageable role."

In contrast, until a one-night reading of "The Normal Heart" in Los Angeles last spring, Grey's only other directing adventure was a 1986 revival of "Zorba" with Anthony Quinn in Chicago.

Grey shoots down the idea that directing and acting use different sides of the brain -- one for the big picture, the other focused on the individual. "I find the impulse to act and to direct comes from the same creative place," he says, "so it's not really any switching of gears for me. For me, directing is essentially guiding the actors to the hearts of their characters, and that's what I always do as an actor first -- look for the heart of the character."

And what characters they have been. Grey, son of Borscht Belt star Mickey Katz, is forever branded as the diabolical Emcee in "Cabaret" (1966 Tony and 1972 Oscar). He had another perfect moment as Amos, hapless husband of Roxie Hart, in the 1996 revival of "Chicago." And, in 2003, he was the first Wizard of Oz in "Wicked."

Of course, the director of "Wicked" is none other than Mantello, though that massively popular spectacle would appear to have little to do with the prickly, provocative sensibilities that won him a 2003 Tony for directing "Take Me Out," Richard Greenberg's Tony-winning gay baseball drama, and a 2004 Tony for the scary-thrilling musical revival of Stephen Sondheim's "Assassins."

"I'm not one of those directors who's patient with a kind of phony process," he told Newsday. "My feelings are we can have good ideas or bad ideas but not no ideas." He said this while working at Lincoln Center in 2002 on

his first musical, "A Man of No Importance," one of my favorite musicals that nobody ever saw.

Based on a small 1994 movie about a stage-struck Dublin bus conductor, the show was quiet but defiantly important, alive with ordinary characters peculiar enough to be real and propelled by music that seemed to love the theater as much as they did.

I still remember the actor who played the gentle, middle-aged transit worker with a yearning smile that almost wept and sweet eyes on the perpetual verge of a wince. That actor? Roger Rees.

As Grey says, "The trick as a director is to get great actors." Vice versa is a good trick, too.