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Jane Fonda and Liza Minnelli at the Easter Bonnet Competition (photo: Aubrey Reuben)

The 23rd annual Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS Easter Bonnet Competition raised $3,402,147 in six weeks of nightly curtain-call appeals. The number was revealed at the April 28 performance at the Minskoff Theatre.

Last year, a record $3.7 million was raised. This year’s $3.4 million total was raised by 56 participating Broadway, Off-Broadway and touring shows.

Special guests Susan Sarandon (Exit the King), Jeremy Irons (Impressionism) and Jane Fonda (33 Variations) presented the awards at the Minskoff Theatre April 28 following the two Easter Bonnet performances (one on Monday, one on Tuesday).

The Broadway production of 33 Variations proved to be the little engine that could, winning both Best Bonnet and Best Presentation. Adding to its triumph was the fact that the drama collected $183,546, the most of any Broadway play or musical, and the all-time record for a non-musical.

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By WENDELL BROCK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Broadway’s ‘33 Variations’ a new play written and directed by Moises Kaufman features Jane Fonda as Dr. Katherine Brandt and Zach Grenier (background) as Ludwig Van Beethoven.

New York — Jane Fonda says critics “excoriated” her 2005 movie, “Monster-in-Law,” a popcorn comedy with Jennifer Lopez that marked her return to filmmaking after a 15-year hiatus. But Fonda says the project relaunched her career and connected her with a new generation of fans.

It also emboldened her to try Broadway again.

On Monday night, after a 46-year absence, the two-time Oscar winner and political activist who became one of Atlanta’s own when she married (and later divorced) media mogul Ted Turner, returns to the Great White Way in “33 Variations.”

…. read complete article on The Atlanta Journal-Constitution site by clicking here

By: Roma Torre
NY1 recently caught up with some high-profile Hollywood performers who are behind new projects slated to open on Broadway within the next few weeks. NY1’s Roma Torre filed the following report.

Academy Award-winning actress Jane Fonda, who was last seen on film in “Georgia Rule,” will return to Broadway’s stages for the first time in over 40 years. The play, Moises Kaufman’s “33 Variations,” is inspired by Ludwig Von Beethoven, which struck a familiar chord in Fonda.

“I happened to be writing about Beethoven, the fact that like many great artists he did his best work later in life when he was physically-challenged, and I got this play about Beethoven later in life, when he was physically-challenged,” says Fonda. “And a musicologist [played by] myself [is] on a quest to discover why he did what he did.”

click here to read the complete article on NY1.com

Jane Fonda returns to the stage, radical and chic.

By Mary Kaye Schilling
All Photographs by Brigitte Lacombe

It is a voice we’ve missed, a voice like no other—an amalgam of disparities and contradictions: tautly seductive, caustic and soothing, detached yet engaged. As complex and mutable, you might say, as the woman herself. So it’s no surprise that for her first Broadway performance in 46 years, Jane Fonda chose a story about transformation. In Moisés Kaufman’s 33 Variations, she plays a musicologist with ALS, hoping to solve one last mystery: why Ludwig van Beethoven spent his final years, stone-deaf, writing 33 small masterpieces based upon one inferior waltz by another man. “I’m attracted to people with passionate obsessions which override things like age or illness,” says Fonda. “I found the play really visionary—the interplay between past and present, between life and death.”

Kaufman gave Fonda the part after a dinner that lasted a little over an hour. “That never happens. Never!” he says. “She was telling me things that I thought of when I was writing the script.” Fonda—who is working on a book about aging for Random House—recounts a curious coincidence. “I was writing a chapter that talked about Beethoven when I got the script,” says the 71-year-old actress, who is a classical-music fan but no expert. “I was writing about how even with infirmities, some of the great people in history—Matisse, Schweitzer, Beethoven—achieved the pinnacle of their work under very challenging circumstances related to age. So this play is the perfect thing for me to be doing right now.”

CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE ON NEW YORK MAGAZINE’S WEB SITE

By CHARLES McGRATH

JANE FONDA, it’s hard to believe, is 71. While the rest of us have just about managed one life, she’s had half a dozen. She has been a sex kitten, a fashion model, a radical and war protester, an Oscar-winning movie star, an exercise impresario and the consort of a billionaire. Her marital history alone has made her a kind of cultural bellwether. Her first husband, the French director Roger Vadim, introduced her to threesomes; she first made love with her second husband, Tom Hayden, after he showed her some slides of Vietnamese peasants (this was back when people took foreplay seriously); and her third husband, Ted Turner, told her on their first date, “I have friends who are Communists.”

These days Ms. Fonda is revisiting an earlier incarnation, Broadway actress, and next month she will star in “33 Variations,” written and directed by Moisés Kaufman, almost 50 years (46 if you want to be fussy) after she last appeared on Broadway, in “Strange Interlude” with Geraldine Page.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE COMPLETE ARTICLE ON NYTIMES.COM

Type On, Golden Blogger: Reading Jane Fonda’s Web Journal

By PATRICK HEALY

Jane Fonda, seen here in 2005, has been blogging about her preparations for the Broadway play “33 Variations.” (Ruth Fremson/The New York Times)

As personal blogs go, this one is a pretty interesting read: Jane Fonda has begun her first-ever web journal to chronicle her return to Broadway, after a four-and-a-half-decade absence, as the star of Moises Kaufman’s new play, “33 Variations.”

The postings, which can be read here, are relatively unguarded for a celebrity blog: Ms. Fonda, 71, writes about her nerves returning to the stage, the ups-and-downs of rehearsals (the play begins preview performances on Monday), her singing lessons, and her experiences living in New York City for several months.

“I’m so glad I didn’t chicken out and not agree to do this out of fear—after 45 years,” Ms. Fonda writes in a Feb. 2 posting. “I could say it’s like sex and riding a bike—it comes right back… but not really. Mostly this because I am so different as a woman.”

Ms. Fonda, in her autobiography and in interviews (including one she did with me in 2001), has often commented about how, early on, the men in her life treated her more like a lost little girl than a mature woman, and how she sometimes took movie roles (such as “Barbarella”) because they suited the feminine image that men believed fit her best.

On the blog, she is similarly candid and self-critical at times, but she is also plainspoken about the excitement and rigors of the challenge of live theater.

“I am fairly confident of my lines now with the exception of the final scene in Act One where all the characters come onstage and have individual lines interspersed, and sometimes spoken simultaneously,” she wrote in a posting on Jan. 24. “It is stylized and I sense it can be effective and theatrical but right now it’s challenging to learn how it all goes together.

“Wouldn’t you think that after fifty years I would have more confidence? But in some ways, it’s just the opposite. More is expected of me and I expect more of myself,” she wrote a few sentences later. Using a theatrical expression for that day’s rehearsal, she went on: “The stumble through did not go well, in my opinion…not for me. I feel very low right now. Very much wondering why I am in this profession. Very much wishing I could disappear to my ranch and never come out. I feel at a loss as to what to do about it. Maybe a good night’s sleep will help. For the first time in my life, I am having trouble sleeping through the night.”

Ms. Fonda also blogs about how much she misses her father, Henry Fonda, with whom she had a rocky relationship through the years. Mr. Fonda began his acting career on Broadway in the 1920s and ‘30s, starring in “The Farmer Takes a Wife” among other productions; he won a Tony as lead actor in “Mister Roberts” in 1948, and was nominated in 1975 for his performance in “Clarence Darrow.”

“Now that I am doing theater again after a huge absence, I can’t help but wish he was still here with me – to see,” Ms. Fonda wrote about her father in a Jan. 29 post. “Not that he would give me advice. That wasn’t his style. But I wish he knew that I’ve come back to his place of love.

“There have been days during these weeks of rehearsals when I seem incapable of doing the same thing over and over…even twice, never mind for 4 years! I wonder how he was able to do it. I want to please him…still. Do we ever get over this need to please the parent we were closest to?”

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