For the first time in 30 years, Bette Midler will appear on Broadway in the new one-character show “I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers.” The acid-tongued super-agent, who died in 2011 at age 79, spearheaded the careers of Barbra Streisand, Cher, Farrah Fawcett and Faye Dunaway, to name a few, in the New Hollywood. Midler, no stranger to extravagant and acerbic roles, plays Mengers and will perform a preview on April 5th before the play officially opens on Broadway April 24th.
Playwright John Logan — the three-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter of such Hollywood blockbusters as “Gladiator” and “Skyfall,” and co-writer of Darren Aronofsky’s forthcoming “Noah” — began working on “I’ll Eat You Last” after finding himself next to Mengers at a dinner party.
In a recent story in Entertainment Weekly, Logan describes Mengers as “incredibly funny, viciously wicked, coy, seductive. But the thing that struck me was this sense of melancholy. She knew her time had passed but this world of movies and movie stars was the only world she’d ever loved,” he says.
Read more about the play here, and Sue Mengers’ obituary in EW here. We will cover the play for review.
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