Ann Magnuson vs. Bebe Neuwirth
Battle of the Slick Sophisticates

When you're growing up in a comparatively small town and are not yet quite old enough to pretend you get Woody Allen movies or appreciate Dorothy Parker, your only (or at least your most immediate) models for the kind of citified style and sophistication to which you aspire are on TV. And to this young person, developing her ideas of glamorous adulthood rested, for a time, on Catherine Hughes, the character Ann Magnuson played on the early '90s sitcom Anything But Love.

Yes, that -- like so many things about my youth -- makes me cringe now. A Canadian cable network recently started airing Anything in syndication, and given how much I had loved it back in the day, I was shocked by how very lame and clichéd it was -- and Catherine in particular. She swans about the office in architecturally unsound costumes, dispensing half-baked trendoid dialogue, and generally acting like the most annoying character edited out of Slaves of New York. It's clear, though, why she would have appealed to me back then: her behaviour was so mannered and pretentious that it satisfied my vague notions of how fancy big-city magazine editors behaved -- and, as we know, the hazy notions of your average dumb-ass sheltered teenager are about the same as the hazy notions of your average dumb-ass sitcom writer. But since I can see now that Catherine was a ridiculous cartoon, you can imagine my surprise when she showed up earlier this year in How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days. Sure, now Catherine Hughes was called Lana Jong, she was Kate Hudson's editor instead of Jamie Lee Curtis's, and was played by Bebe Neuwirth in less outlandish outfits than Catherine's, but Neuwirth's glossy editrix is as one-dimensional and clichéd as Catherine was.

Ann Magnuson and Bebe Neuwirth started their careers in very different places, but since then have ended up in pretty much the same spot (or slot, as it were). Magnuson -- who is also known as a "performance artist" (a nebulous job category which, as far as we can tell, mostly just requires her to appear in her IMDb photo with some fruity shawl wrapped around her head) -- started out playing bohemian New Yorkers in movies about bohemian New Yorkers, like Desperately Seeking Susan and Mondo New York. She got to be all weird and eccentric and wear a lot of makeup and generally make a spectacle of herself, which she seemed to enjoy; as she got older, however, such flamboyant displays became less winning and more blowsy, and she started making supporting appearances in painfully mainstream movies like Clear and Present Danger, Before and After, and Glitter (with occasional forays into more cultish fare like Tank Girl and Cabin Boy). Now that she's a woman of a certain age (a certain age that starts with a "4"), Magnuson has left behind her bohemian early '80s leanings, instead turning up onscreen playing moms, bosses, and real estate agents.

Neuwirth, on the other hand -- and as most of us know -- started out on Cheers, playing Frasier's infamously tight-assed wife Lillith. The point of Lillith's character mostly seemed to be to fill the tight-assed void left by Shelley Long's departure; however, in one of Lillith's earliest episodes, she gets a sexy makeover for a TV appearance with Frasier -- her hair all blown out, her blouse half-undone -- and seduces her future husband with an energetic game of footsie. Lillith was virtually never allowed to return to that kind of unbuttoned abandon, but in order not to be identified with that role forever, Neuwirth did a champion job in her spare time playing roles that were very different from Lillith -- sexy, sultry seductresses in movies like The Associate and onstage in Damn Yankees, no-nonsense types in Malice, The Faculty, and Liberty Heights, and even the nerdy sheltered girl's eventual patron saint, Dorothy Parker, in the TV movie Dash and Lilly.

The one role that has had the single greatest effect on Neuwirth's post-Cheers career, however, isn't one she played onscreen. Well, it's one she could have played onscreen if Miramax wasn't run by dimwits: Velma Kelly in Chicago. Neuwirth played Velma in the long-running Broadway revival of Chicago, and though this commentator never saw the production, I do own and love the soundtrack. Though Roxie (the part Renée Zellweger lost the Oscar for) is the supposed star of Chicago -- the protagonist whose struggle we're supposed to care about more and blah blah blah -- Velma is the more compelling character by far (which may be why Catherine Zeta-Jones, who played her in the movie, didn't lose the Oscar playing her). On the Broadway soundtrack album, it really sounds like Neuwirth is having a great time playing her: Velma -- unlike simpy Roxie -- is smart, sexy, charismatic, resourceful, a proven performer, and, best of all, gets to sell out simpy Roxie at her trial.

Maybe if Magnuson had had the pipes and gams to play Velma Kelly on Broadway, it would be she who, in the latter part of her career, got to play over-forty seductresses in movies like Tadpole, and brainy professionals in movies like Le Divorce. But she didn't, and Bebe Neuwirth did. Too bad for Ann Magnuson. And therefore....

Advantage: Pfffft. Neuwirth, obviously.