![]() They talked until three in the morning, then Rees got in a car to J.F.K. The next night, Elice prepared pigeon en croûte at his apartment, on West Fifty-seventh Street (Rees: “The croûte was bigger than the apartment”). ![]() “It was the raincoat that did it.” Rees was flying to London in two days, to star in Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Thing.” Did he have time for dinner before then? “Standing before me was a six-foot-four, extraordinarily handsome American in a Burberry raincoat,” Rees recalled. He waited outside the stage door to introduce himself. At the dress rehearsal, he spotted Rees in the audience. No response.ġ982: Elice was working at an ad agency, and one of his clients was “Cats,” also directed by Nunn. He dropped it off at the theatre the next day. Enraptured, Elice wrote a letter that night on yellow legal paper, inviting Rees to come see him do a tap number at a benefit. Turns out it was the guy playing Nicholas Nickleby. From the nosebleeds, he noticed a “devastatingly beautiful” actor milling around before the show. Elice was incensed: “I went to Equity and said, ‘I would like to start a committee to keep British actors out of Broadway.’ ” (“British Out of Broadway would be BOOB,” Rees added.) Elice went to see the play anyway. Tell me what time to show up.” Two weeks later, Nunn replied: Not hiring Americans.ġ981: Nunn’s mammoth eight-and-a-half-hour production of “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby” came to New York. (Elice also co-wrote, with Marshall Brickman, the books for “Jersey Boys” and “The Addams Family,” in which Rees starred, as Gomez.) To understand how Rees and Elice became partners, in art and in life, you have to go back a ways, they explained the other day, as a hired computer geek fiddled upstairs, trying to synch the couple’s electronic devices.ġ979: Elice, a young actor out of the Yale School of Drama, wrote a letter to Trevor Nunn, then the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, saying, “I’m getting on a plane and I’m coming over to the R.S.C. Rees (Welshman, genteel) co-directed, with Alex Timbers. Elice (New Yorker, garrulous) is the author of “Peter and the Starcatcher,” a fanciful prequel to “Peter Pan,” which has been nominated for nine Tony Awards. Rick Elice and Roger Rees Illustration by Tom Bachtellįor sixteen years, the actor Roger Rees and the playwright Rick Elice have lived in a book-crammed apartment in the Beresford, on Central Park West.
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