It’s the odd Broadway season that doesn’t include Terrence Mann. After star turns in “Cats,” “Les Misérables” and “Beauty and the Beast,” he’s now in “Tuck Everlasting,” which opened this week. The 64-year-old tells BARBARA HOFFMAN where you’ll find him during the rare times he’s neither onstage nor at home in Harlem with his wife, Charlotte d’Amboise, and their two daughters.
We usually eat within a four-block radius. There’s a neighborhood restaurant called Lido we like very much. There are French doors that open out onto the street, and the spaghettini arrabiata is really good — and really spicy! There’s another place called Blujeen that serves stuff in little bitty cast-iron skillets — ribs and collard greens and all manner of rice. I’ve lived in Kentucky and North Carolina, and everybody’s got their own way of doing ribs. Some are dry rub, some are wet. Here it’s dry rub and falling-off-the-bone delicious. And then there’s the Cecil. The guy who runs it is Alexander Smalls, and we both went to the [University of] North Carolina School of the Arts, where he studied opera. He does a combination of Caribbean, African and low-Southern cooking that’s extraordinary!
My favorite museum is the Frick. Harry Groener, Héctor Mercado and I shared a dressing room when we were doing “Cats” in 1982, and we wanted to have a civilized excursion on our day off. So the three of us dressed up in suits and trench coats, and the first place we went to was the Frick. I couldn’t believe that all the paintings and furnishings I’d studied in history books were in this one private collection.
We used to take the kids to the Big Apple Circus, but now that they’re 12 and 13 they see the shows Charlotte and I are in. They saw “Tuck” on opening night. They also saw the first preview. I asked them what they thought then, and they said, “It’s better than it was in Atlanta!” — which is all you can hope for.