Broadway Act 2

Whoopi Goldberg stands there with a loopy grin on her face, letting the huzzahs wash over her. This is not her “Did you guys get that?” grin. This is not her “You know exactly what I’m talking about” grin. This one is sheer delight, a pure “I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else on Earth” grin.

And where she is is about as far from Hollywood as she can get, on the stage of the St. James Theater, on West 44th Street, about to declaim the opening line of “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” It’s only the second preview, a few weeks before her March 6 official opening. “Playgoers, I bid you welcome,” she intones. But it’s the other way around. The playgoers are bidding her welcome, and the love fest continues through the intermission, through the curtain calls, through an hourlong wait in the alleyway of the theater, where high school kids who’ve been bused in from Rhode Island chant “Whoopi, Whoopi, Whoopi,” as she signs programs in a stately but efficient progress to the waiting limo.

The last time she was on Broadway, there were no screaming fans from far away, no limo, no hovering security detail. It was 13 years ago, and she’d been discovered by Mike Nichols doing her one-woman show at Dance Theater Workshop, a performance space tucked up a flight of stairs near her old Chelsea neighborhood. He took the show to Broadway, it captivated New York and Steven Spielberg, and the rest is, well . . . history, on record at your nearby video store and in any tabloid paper you care to buy.

And that’s part of the reason she’s returned to New York, to the stage.

“I loved making movies,” she says, “but a lot of people have spoiled it for me. I figured I’d bow out while I still had a smile on my face.” So here she sits in a small Broadway dressing room, the smoke from her cigarettes barely making a dent in the fragrance from banks of floral tributes, explaining her decision to replace Nathan Lane in the leading role of the year-old hit revival of “Forum.” She’s smaller than she appears on stage, and that familiar, outrageous Whoopi persona is hard to discern in this quietly open woman.

“For the last couple of years,” she says, “I’ve been saying I wanted to come back. But it’s hard to come back, because you’re bringing all this crap that you didn’t have originally. And you don’t want to have somebody put their faith in you and then get decimated--not because you’re not good, but because someone has decided, ‘How dare you, movie person, come here?’ ”

She didn’t feel she could do another one-woman show. “I don’t have much to say out of Whoopi that isn’t angry about the world,” she says, “and I haven’t found that fine line of humor within the anger.” So she was hunting around for a suitable Broadway something when her agent, Jeff Hunter, who also represents Lane, made the suggestion.

Yes, the role is a Roman slave. Yes, Nathan Lane is a white man. Yes, Goldberg had never done a book musical before. And yes, the show’s leering combination of vaudeville and Plautus gives it a somewhat dated attitude toward women. But yes, yes, yes, yes, the show’s producers and high-powered creative team--composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, co-author Larry Gelbart, director Jerry Zaks--wanted Whoopi. (So far, it looks as though their confidence has been warranted. Though they would not provide specific ticket sales figures, producers say the box office for her run is “extremely healthy.”)

“One of the things I said to Mr. Sondheim when I met him,” Goldberg says, “was, ‘Are you OK with this? Because I’m not known for this, but I feel like I can do it.’ And he said, ‘Oh, I more than think that you can do it. Otherwise you wouldn’t be here.’ ”

Zaks remembers the phone call in which her name was first mentioned. “After I picked myself off the floor,” he says, “I went through the piece, and thought, ‘Why not?’ It’s a story about a slave who wants to be free. Period.”

So Gelbart changed all the pronouns and a few lines of dialogue; Sondheim changed a few song lyrics; a new costume was prepared. And presto-chango, the role of Pseudolus was Whoopi-ready. That’s when Whoopi began wondering if she was Pseudolus-ready.

“From the moment I said yes, my confidence began to erode,” she says. “It’s not just that it’s a lot of stuff and my character is on a lot of the time. But there’s Zero Mostel [who created the role in 1962], there’s Nathan Lane [who won the Tony for it in 1996]. And it’s never done by a woman. Was it going to cause people to lose their jobs because they would make changes? A lot of things went through my head, and I started to get very scared that maybe I’d made a mistake. But I have a great man in my life who said, ‘No, you’ve not made a mistake. The mistake was staying away so long.’ ”

The man, of course, is Frank Langella, her co-star in last summer’s basketball comedy “Eddie,” and a longtime stage draw whose career has hit new heights with back-to-back successes: last season’s Strindberg melodrama “The Father” and his current hit, Noel Coward’s “Present Laughter.” If Goldberg had any doubts about Langella’s assessment, they were erased when she began rehearsing. “It’s like beginning to exercise again,” she says. “It’s a muscle that I let atrophy in making the movies.”

“We started rehearsals in October,” says Zaks, “which is a very long time. Because she wants to get it right. And that means repetition, repetition, repetition. It’s very different from the film process. It’s more like training for an athletic competition, and she’s embraced that.”

Despite reports to the contrary in New York gossip columns, Zaks has only praise for his new star. “The situation she’s in--about to assume responsibility for this huge enterprise, and be exposed in the way that only being on stage can expose you--is terrifying. And you have several options for what to do with your terror,” he says. “You can become a real jerk and act out, or you can simply acknowledge it and work as hard you can. And she’s doing the latter. She’s a real mensch.” Others involved in the show agree. And by the time they get around to her intelligence and her all-around niceness, she sounds like a candidate for sainthood.

“The first day I rehearsed with her,” says Ross Lehman, another cast replacement, “I heard her asking, ‘Can we have a signer for the deaf at one of the shows and have a bunch of deaf people? Do you have those earphones for the blind? Do you have any kind of plan for students? Because if you give them half-price I’ll pay the other half.’ She remembered that she’d had a deal like that when she was a kid. I was hers after that.”

And she, in turn, keeps interrupting herself to say what a “great, great time” she’s having, what “a blast” it is, how generally ecstatic she is to be working with theater people instead of in the movies.

“It’s been a resurgence,” she says. “I think it probably saved my head. Frankly, leaving Los Angeles for me means that the box office doesn’t have to be part of my everyday existence. In L.A., the question is always, ‘Am I a failure because my box office isn’t good?’ And I started to fall into that, and got very, very sad. I needed a lifeline, really. So perhaps the answer is, I think this has saved my life.”

She leaves that hanging in the air for a moment and catches it with an afterthought: “Not that I was gonna do away with myself.” But it’s clear she’s bitter about the way Hollywood works, triumphant Oscar nights notwithstanding.

“I have no bad feelings about any of the films I’ve done, except one.” She means “T. Rex,” a “terrible” movie she tried to back out of but wound up making as the settlement of a $20-million breach of contract suit.

“Am I sad that they don’t make a lot of money?” She thinks for a minute. “Slightly. ‘Cause they’re like Marley’s ghost, you know, they carry this chain: box-office flops. Which says nothing about the quality of the film. And I’m tired of that. I’m tired of reading that. ‘Boys on the Side’ is a good movie. And ‘Corrina, Corrina’ is a good movie. And ‘Ghosts of Mississippi’ is a good movie.

“ ‘Eddie’ made a lot of money,” she says. The movie, with a budget of approximately $30-million, took in just over $31-million at the box office. “It didn’t make as much as ‘Twister,’ but it came out at the same time. So up against that, it looks like it didn’t do anything. And what I hate is that it’s left dangling that way, that because it didn’t have box office meant it wasn’t a good movie. There are lots of movies that make a lot of money that are real garbage.” Pause. “At least that’s my opinion.”

After watching the four movies she appeared in last year--”Eddie,” “The Associate,” “Bogus” and “Ghosts of Mississippi”--range from disappointing to outright failure at the box office, she says she’s tired of what she sees as Hollywood’s misunderstanding of the actor’s role in the industry. “You go to work and you say, ‘OK, here’s my interpretation.’ You do your job. And then you go to the movie and you go, ‘What movie is this?’ But when you read about it, it becomes about how you didn’t do your job, if you had done your job better, this wouldn’t be happening--forgetting the directors and the editors and the studio people and everybody who has a little finger in there. You basically are left with the failure. But you have to share the win. So it’s now my four flops, as opposed to a marketing mess-up or putting out a movie at a stupid time. Sure, there are one or two that weren’t good. And those, you say, ‘Well, this wasn’t a good movie, and here’s why.’ But it’s not about how much money it makes.”

Goldberg may despise the film industry’s obsession with the bottom line, but she’s perfectly willing to admit she’ll probably be making another movie at the end of the year, and that she herself is thinking about projects that will make her more secure financially--this from someone whose fee for the 1993 film “Sister Act II,” reportedly at least $7 million, made her the highest-paid black actress in history.

“You want to make sure your kids are comfortable if you die,” she says. “You want to make sure that taxes are not going to eat up everything. You want to make sure you can keep your house.”

So she’s not sure what she’ll take on after her stint in “Forum” ends--she’s signed on through June. She says she’d like to try another TV series, having already appeared in “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and “Bagdad Cafe.”

“I like the possibilities of intelligence in the medium. Or maybe I’ll design some jewelry and do QVC.”

She talks wistfully of working on stage with Langella. The “bonus” of “Forum,” she says, is that they are now in the same time zone and on the same schedule. “We could do ‘Private Lives’ together,” she says, “or ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ That would be great fun. There’s lots of things that are out there, I think, for us. But also I think he’s in a time now where he should be doing the great parts.” And then she runs down a list of classics, from “King Lear” to “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” that would keep him busy for a decade. “I should be one of his agents,” she says.

That career move she’s probably not considering. As for the other possibilities, she smiles contentedly and says, “‘I’ve got until June to figure it out.”

The creators of “Forum” have somewhat less time in which to figure out their next move: finding someone to follow Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Godfrey Cambridge, Nathan Lane, and now, Whoopi Goldberg. They’re keeping their options open--Goldberg is surely the only woman on Broadway whose understudy is a man. When asked who the next Pseudolus might be, Gelbart conceded that the production “probably won’t get another gift of this magnitude.” But he has a solidly multicultural suggestion. “I was thinking maybe Jackie Chan,” he says.