Tony Award winner Geoffrey Rush wants to return to Broadway in the next couple of years — with another production from his native Australia.

 ”I’m trying to find something because I definitely want to come back here in the next couple of years,” Rush told reporters backstage after winning the best actor in a play Tony Award on Sunday for his Broadway debut in “Exit The King.”

He wants to create a link between Australian theaters and Broadway similar to the “pathway” he said exists between top London theaters and Broadway, which helps some British productions find their way to New York’s Great White Way.

“I’d love to try and now help establish even a stronger bond for some of the great original work that’s coming out of Australian theaters,” said Oscar winner Rush.

“Billy Elliot The Musical,” which won 10 Tony Awards including best musical, and “The Norman Conquests,” which won best revival of a play, both came to Broadway from London.

A veteran theater actor in Australia, Rush received rave reviews for his Broadway debut in “Exit The King,” which he and the play’s director Neil Armfield adapted from Eugene Ionesco’s 1962 play. The production, which played in Australia in 2007, finishes its three-month Broadway run on Sunday.

“I’m a very slow learner,” Rush, 57, joked of his late Broadway debut. “It took me into my 40s to find the right time to be in film.” 

“People have offered me roles before and I didn’t really feel like plunging into being a guest on four-week rehearsal period on some kind of classic,” he said. “I wanted to bring something out of our theatrical soil that we’d already tested.”

(PHOTO: REUTERS/Lucas Jackson)

He has been nominated for Golden Globes and Emmy Awards and won MTV Movie Awards and People’s Choice Awards. Could a Tony Award be next for actor Will Ferrell?

Ferrell opens on Broadway this week playing the role he made famous on during the 2000 U.S. presidential elections on “Saturday Night Live” — President George W. Bush — in “You’re Welcome America. A Final Night with George W. Bush.”

For 90 minutes Ferrell swaggers around the stage as Bush, taking the audience through a condensed version of his life and eight years as president, referring to his successor President Barack Obama as “the Tiger Woods guy.”

A dancing secret service agent who doesn’t speak during the performance is played by Ferrell’s brother Patrick and there is a brief yet explosive appearance by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Ferrell, who has starred in movies such as “Talladega Nights” and “Elf,” got a standing ovation at Monday night’s performance of the show which officially opens on Broadway on Thursday and runs until March 15.

(Writing and reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis)

New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley has gone back to Broadway to see “Speed-the-Plow” now that its star Jeremy Piven has left the cast complaining of sushi-induced mercury poisoning, and in a piece on Tuesday pointed out the “blessings that have arrived with his departure.”  
    
Brantley went on to say, “Mr. Piven’s absence has made me fonder of ‘Speed-the-Plow’ than I would ever have thought possible.”
    
Norbert Leo Butz replaced Piven, a star on the HBO show “Entourage,” from Dec. 23 through Jan. 11 and William H. Macy currently has the part, in the 1988 play from author David Mamet.
    
Brantley wrote that those two actors are not necessarily better than Piven. But he explains that seeing Butz and Macy in the part has allowed him to get a different view of the character Piven played, a chief of production at a Hollywood studio. And he says they have done a fine job picking up the pieces after Piven left. Brantley also said “Mad Men” star Elisabeth Moss and “Pushing Daisies” actor Raul Esparza have grown in their roles in “Speed-the-Plow” since he first saw them when Piven was part of the cast.
    
“That Mr. Piven hasn’t been part of that evolution is his loss,” Brantley wrote.
    
When Piven left the show last month, blaming mercury poisoning from too much sushi, Mamet responded by giving trade paper Daily Variety the biting line: “My understanding is that he is leaving show business to pursue a career as a thermometer.”
    
Mamet was not the only skeptic. The Center for Consumer Freedom even said Piven would have to eat 108 pieces of tuna sushi role every week for his entire life to feel any new health risks from mercury.

“Entourage” star Jeremy Piven started rehearsals this week on another show about the inside world of show-business, only this time it’s on a Broadway stage.

Piven is starring in a revival of David Mamet’s play “Speed-the-Plow,” billed as a “scathing portrait of the film industry and the people who are willing to sell their souls for sex, fame and fortune.”

“It’s an incredibly timely piece. It’s actually more true today even than when he wrote it,” Piven told reporters at the start of the second day of rehearsals on Tuesday.

“We did a reading yesterday and I was surprised yet again how powerful and funny this piece is,” said Piven, looking a little-bleary eyed before the morning rehearsal.

The cast also includes Elisabeth Moss, star of the hit TV show “Mad Men” and familiar to many as the president’s daughter in “West Wing.” She is reviving a role played by Madonna in the last Broadway production of the play 20 years ago.

The third major role is taken by Raul Esparza, the only one of the three who has trod the boards on Broadway before.

Piven starred in the off-Broadway play “Fat Pig” by Neil LaBute in 2004 but this will be his Broadway debut.

Previews start on Oct. 3 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre and opening night is Oct. 23. 

PICTURE: Reuters/Mike Cassese (Actor Jeremy Piven arrives at special presentation screening of ‘RocknRolla’ at Toronto International Film Festival, 4 Sept. 2008)