Jumping from Night Music to London's An Ideal Husband, Alexander Hanson Dishes on Bernadette, Elaine, Catherine & Angela

After playing Fredrik Egerman in Trevor Nunn’s hit London revival of A Little Night Music, Alexander Hanson transferred to Broadway with the show, romancing the Desirees of Catherine Zeta-Jones and Bernadette Peters. Scarcely had Hanson set foot back in London before he was in rehearsals to play Sir Robert Chiltern in a new West End revival of Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband, which begins performances on November 4 at the Vaudeville. It’s a welcome homecoming for Hanson, especially because he’ll be sharing the stage for the first time with his real-life wife, Samantha Bond, as the villainous Mrs. Cheveley. The actor paused one recent lunchtime for a friendly chat with Broadway.com about his return to London, the New York high life and what his famous Broadway leading ladies are really like.

Welcome back to London! Does it feel as if you’ve never been away?
New York feels like ages ago now. We’re deep in Ideal Husband rehearsals way up at the top of the Old Vic, where we’ve just finished a run-through of Act One. I did my last [Night Music] show in New York at a Sunday matinee, flew back to London that night, got into Heathrow Monday lunchtime and went straight into rehearsal Tuesday morning.

That must have been intense.
It was! [Laughs.] I was not only battling jet lag, but there I’d been in New York, happy as Larry, and all of a sudden here I was doing the laundry again, going to the supermarket, cooking for four—all those things I had forgotten about. I also hadn’t really rehearsed in two years. I had been playing Fredrik for so long and had such ease with it. Suddenly the ease is gone, you don’t know the words and you don’t know the story because the piece is not in your bones yet.

You’ve done An Ideal Husband before, right?
Yes, twice, as a baby actor playing very, very small parts. My first job at the Redgrave Theatre, Farnham, was in this play with Jeremy Sinden as Lord Goring and then later, at Chichester, I played Mr. Montford. Joanna Lumley, who was a few streets away from me in New York in La Bete, was playing Mrs. Cheveley.

Your current Lady Cheveley is your wife [Samantha Bond, Moneypenny in four James Bond films]. Are you two the new Lunts?
In our early days we weren’t that keen to work together. As we’ve grown up and gathered mutual respect in terms of our profession, we both felt, “If something turns up, we’ll give it some thought.” What happened here is that Sam and I share the same agent, and she had been offered the gig. Because our agent had seen the breakdown [of roles], she suggested me for one of the parts. It turned out that our producer had seen me on Broadway and said, “What a great idea.” For me, it was a no-brainer: a fantastic part in a fantastic play with a cracking company, and I had been out of the country for 11 months. What a great way to announce yourself back in London.

Especially in a play dating from 1895 that in some ways seems forever young.
Well, it’s about a corrupt politician, that’s why—a politician running on the morality ticket and then being upended by a misdemeanor committed in his youth. I think that’s all too familiar. And Wilde shows you the fallout from that as it affects the family, which is always very, very relevant.

The verbal dexterity of Wilde isn’t a million miles removed from that of Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, who wrote the book of A Little Night Music.
They’re not dissimilar. Night Music doesn’t have quite the heightened language of Wilde, but they nonetheless do both go at a certain clip.

You had quite an array of co-stars during your Broadway run. How would you compare and contrast your two Desirees, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Bernadette Peters?
It’s a very good question. Apart from the fact that any two people are very different, Catherine obviously has this Hollywood glamour about her. She is used to being the center of attention to hundreds of millions of people and has the lifestyle to go with it, so she would bring that to her Desiree—which is very funny and valid and interesting. Bernadette, without being disrespectful to Catherine, is very much a theater actress, a Broadway star. Catherine was wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but what Bernadette has is that whole background in the theater and the skills you develop from years of treading the boards, which has to do with the way you relate to other people. There’s a whole craft involved, which you develop and finesse.

And for her to come in when everyone had thought the show was closing…
As had I! I had been looking forward to re-joining my cricket team [in London] and seeing my family, and suddenly I got a call. My son [Tom, 17] and I were throwing a baseball around in Central Park, and our producer was on the phone explaining the situation—and of course I had to stay. What was extraordinary about Bernadette was that she seemed so unfazed coming in. She has confidence in herself, with reason, and she’s got a great soul.

What about your Mme. Armfeldts, Angela Lansbury and Elaine Stritch?
They couldn’t be more different! Angela is just a master, and very funny. There would be times when she didn’t remember quite what she was meant to say, but because of her technique and her craft she knew what she was supposed to say; then she would paraphrase, which turned out to be funnier than the Hugh Wheeler script [laughs]. Elaine is a piece of work, as everyone knows, but god, I love her! Maybe I was fortunate in that I had nothing to do with her on stage—we shared one scene but didn’t interact—but we got on like a house on fire. I love, too, that hers is very much not a Mme. Armfeldt who slept her way around the crown heads of Europe but, instead, Ma Armfeldt in her rocking chair in the Midwest with a shotgun by her side, ready to shoot a prairie dog.

Utterly distinctive, as is Elaine’s wont.
Her “Liaisons” is an object lesson. That is a long, long song, and she doesn’t take any prisoners. It’s utterly riveting. Whereas Angela mined the script for every single laugh, Elaine went, perhaps, to a darker place. Both women are class, class acts.

How do you look back on your time on Broadway?
It was an extraordinary experience with great highs and great lows. Manhattan can be a lonely place, especially when you’re away from your friends and your family, and Night Music is a show that, done right, can cost you a little. But the upside of it all, obviously, is that you’re in that fabulous city, and I met some fantastic people, not least Bernadette.

So it wasn’t all hanging out on the top floor of [theater district eatery] Angus McIndoe with Nathan Lane?
God, I wish—and if it was, I’m not telling you!