Other Mother's Day

Move over, Teri Hatcher, because there's another Other Mother in town -- and this time she's a man! Portraying the same manipulative matron voiced by the desperate housewife in the recent animated film version, out actor David Greenspan inhabits Other Mother in a creepy new apparition of Coraline off-Broadway.

Based on Neil Gaiman's 2002 children's novel, which Greenspan also adapted for the stage, the ambitious musical further challenges expectations with the casting of middle-aged Tony nominee Jayne Houdyshell as precocious 9-year-old protagonist Coraline Jones. Feeling neglected by her preoccupied mother and father, Coraline discovers an enticing parallel world behind a strange door in her new apartment, but she quickly realizes that her Other parents aren't as perfect as they seem.

Helmed by out director Leigh Silverman (Lisa Kron's Well ) and featuring music by out singer-songwriter Stephin Merritt of the Magnetic Fields, Coraline opened June 1 and runs through July 5 at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. A fixture of New York's downtown performance scene (and an Obie award winner for Terrence McNally's Some Men and a revival of Matt Crowley's The Boys in the Band ), Greenspan gives Advocate.com the gender-bending goods on his otherworldly villainess.