Great Performances 20th Anniversary Special

Wendy Wasserstein’s ode to the theater, “Kiss, Kiss Dahlings,” directed by Gerald Gutierrez, is slight and obvious, but Blythe Danner, Nancy Marchand and Cynthia Nixon are lovely as three mother-daughter generations seen in three different eras. Terrence McNally’s “Last Mile” is an audacious fillip from an opera buff. It takes place backstage at the Metropolitan Opera as a soprano (Bernadette Peters) prepares to make her Met debut and, while warming up for “Tosca,” confronts jitters, ghosts and the specter of AIDS.

Just after I graduated one of the first plays I did in New York, a Civil War melodrama called “Secret Service”, was taped for the series in 1976. It was the first time I ever appeared in front of a camera and got paid for it. A year later I appeared again in the series in Wendy Wasserstein’s “Uncommon Women and Others”, one of her first plays. That’s the magic of “Great Performances”. It’s a record of all those great performances that woule have just floated off into the air (Meryl Streep introducing the programme).

Directed by the television veteran Paul Bogart, Ms. Peters, Nathan Lane, Paul Sorvino, Tony Goldwyn and Bill Irwin serve the playwright splendidly. Alan Zweibel’s “Simple Melody” is a clever mini-musical, with Cy Coleman as composer, about a boy pianist who, plugging away on a little tune, grows up to be not just Matthew Broderick married to Jane Krakowski, but also rich and famous. Moving away from theater pieces, there is “Not My Girl,” a Fred Astaire fantasy choreographed by Peter Martins of the New York City Ballet and danced by Kyra Nichols outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. In “Zoetrope,” the photographer Annie Leibovitz uses Mikhail Baryshnikov and Twyla Tharp to illustrate a complex movement study.