How To "How to Succeed"

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January 20, 2011, 9:30 am

Anchor Away! Anderson Cooper on How He Landed in ‘How to Succeed’ on Broadway

By Dave Itzkoff

Anderson Cooper knows it’s been a good, long while since he’s seen a Broadway show – possibly as long ago as the late 1970s, when he was 11 and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, took him to see the original Broadway run of “Evita.”

“It’s embarrassing, I know,” said Mr. Cooper, the anchor of CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” in a telephone interview. “But you know, I work nights, so doing any kind of activity is difficult. That’s my excuse.”

That self-admitted gap in Mr. Cooper’s education will not impede him from making his own Broadway debut, of sorts: he has been cast as the Book Voice – that is, the cautionary, advice-giving narrator – in the coming revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.” The production, which is to begin previews next month at the Al Hirschfeld Theater, which will star Daniel Radcliffe as J. Pierrepont Finch, the aspiring executive played by Robert Morse in the original Broadway run.

The lineage of Mr. Cooper’s role was a powerful incentive for him to take the part, he said. He will be succeeding the CBS anchor Walter Cronkite, who played the Book Voice in the musical’s 1995 Broadway revival. (“It’s following in his footsteps, I’d say,” Mr. Cooper said. “It was one of the nice historical elements about it.”)

But mostly Mr. Cooper said he was surprised when Craig Zadan, who is producing the latest “How to Succeed” revival with Neil Meron, contacted him about the part. By coincidence, Mr. Cooper said he had just seen Mr. Radcliffe in “My Boy Jack,” a film shown on “Masterpiece Theater” in which he plays the son of Rudyard Kipling. (“I had also just seen the latest ‘Harry Potter,’” Mr. Cooper confessed.)

Though Mr. Cooper is also a correspondent for “60 Minutes” and is preparing to add a syndicated daytime talk show, “Anderson,” to his workload, the Broadway gig shouldn’t distract from those duties: his “How to Succeed” lines are prerecorded and played during the show so he doesn’t actually have to be at the theater.

Mr. Cooper said he had recently completed a recording session with some assistance from Mr. Radcliffe, who made his own Broadway debut in 2008.

“He mentioned something to me about when he was in ‘Equus,’” Mr. Cooper said. “I didn’t know if I should pretend like I saw him when he was in it.”

Fearing he might be quizzed about it, Mr. Cooper was honest about not having seen that production – although he did see the play as an adolescent during its original 1970s run, among the other adult-oriented content he was prematurely introduced to at his mother’s behest.

“She also took me to ‘Luna,’” Mr. Cooper said, referring to the 1979 Bernardo Bertolucci movie starring Jill Clayburgh as a woman who has an incestuous relationship with her teenage son.

“My mom’s judgment, I’m not sure if it was the best,” Mr. Cooper continued. “In fact, we were rejected from one theater, they refused to sell tickets to me. But my mom was not deterred. She just took me to some other theater.”

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