Casting is complete for Mark Ravenhill’s new autobiographical play Angela, the first in the Sound Stage audio series from The Royal Lyceum Theatre Edinburgh and Pitlochry Festival Theatre, in association with Naked Productions and BBC Radio 3.
Airing March 26–28, the presentation will be led by Pam Ferris (Matilda) and Matti Houghton (Call the Midwife) as Angela, BAFTA winner Toby Jones (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy) as Ted, and Jackson Laing (The Boy in the Dress) and Joseph Millson (Angel Has Fallen) as Mark with Nadia Albina (Emilia), Dermot Daly (Accidental Therapists), Raj Ghatak (Christopher Robin), Olivier Huband (Barefoot in the Park), Alexandra Mathie (Cockpit), and Kirsty Stuart. Naked Productions’ Polly Thomas directs.
Angela centers on the playwright’s mother, at the age of 84 and suffering with dementia, as she looks back across her life. Cutting between Angela in her old age and in her youth, the play depicts her struggle with depression and the challenges of her own aspirations, set against Mark’s experience of beginning to learn ballet in his fifties.
Playwright Ravenhill says, “With the death of my mum in 2019, I was drawn for the first time to write an autobiographical play. I was particularly interested to explore the way culture high and low had impacted on Mum’s life and our lives as a family. The play is constructed around a series of encounters with children’s literature, classical ballet, amateur theatre, and popular song— encounters that shaped my mum’s sense of self and her relationship with me. Both my parents are from working class backgrounds which gives a specific turn to their relationship to culture and to me. As I thought about a form that could move swiftly in time and location and between inner thought and outer action, I realized that this was best written as a radio play. I feel it’s the most ‘radio’ of the radio plays that I’ve written…”
The Sound Stage series, which continues through October 31, will also include Tennis Elbow by John Byrne, Hindu Times by Jamini Jethwa, The Mother Land by Lynda Radley, Black Diamonds and the Blue Brazil by Gary McNair, Sophia by Francis Poet, and new works by Timberlake Wertenbaker and Roy Williams.
Actors Equity Association hasannounced its commitment to pursue a new diversity, equity and inclusion policy agenda for the industry in partnership with arts, entertainment and media unions.
Some Like It Hot has found a new member of its creative team The Shubert Organization and Neil Meron have just announced Emmy nominated writer and performer Amber Ruffin joins Tony nominee Matthew Lopez to adapt the musical comedy from the beloved MGM film.
The Broadway-aimed Some Like It Hot is still chugging along during the pandemic, adding another writer to its creative team. Writer and comedian Amber Ruffin will now pen the book to the new musical adaptation, joining the previously reported Matthew López (currently Tony-nominated for The Inheritance).
The creative team also includes songwriting duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (who previously musicalized the creation of the 1959 MGM film in “Let’s Be Bad” from the fictional Smash musical Bombshell) and director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw.
Matthew Lopez Joseph Marzullo/WENN
The musical now aims to premiere on Broadway in 2022. In the early months of the coronavirus shutdown, producers Neil Meron (also a Smash veteran) and Bob Wankel (of the Shubert Organization) announced that the show would scrap its previously announced out-of-town tryout in Chicago (originally slated to begin this March) and open directly in New York in the fall.
Ruffin’s involvement signals a departure from the Billy Wilder source material, resulting in a new take that the writer calls “honestly groundbreaking.” The character of Sugar—portrayed in the film by Marilyn Monroe—will be reworked as Black, with her racial identity providing more than an opportunity for color-blind casting.
“It is an exciting proposition to create a show with characters whose race is instrumental and not incidental to the story,” López says. “It became apparent to me that if we were to honor our commitment to tell that story with honesty and integrity, it required a Black creative voice on the team. It didn’t take long for all of us to agree that Amber was the person to approach.”
Inspired by the French film Fanfare of Love, Some Like It Hot follows two Prohibition-era jazz musicians in Chicago (played on screen by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon), who witness a mob hit and go into hiding by disguising themselves as members of an all-female band. Through their escape plot, the two become enamored with the band’s singer and ukulele player, Sugar (Marilyn Monroe). Incidentally, that character became the namesake for a previous Broadway adaptation of the comedy: the 1972 musical Sugar.
Ruffin is currently host, writer, and executive producer of The Amber Ruffin Show on the NBC streaming platform Peacock. She concurrently remains on the writing team on Late Night With Seth Meyers (becoming the first Black woman to write for a late-night network talk show), for which she earned an Emmy nomination. Her additional credits include Detroiters, Drunk History, and A Black Lady Sketch Show. She recently published her book You’ll Never Believe What Happened to Lacey: Crazy Stories of Racism, co-written with her sisterLacey Lamar.
1865 Birthday of Beatrice Stella Tanner, better known by her stage name, Mrs. Patrick Campbell. She has a long correspondence with playwright George Bernard Shaw and appears in many of his plays, creating the role of Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion.
1926Charles MacArthur and Edward Sheldon have a hit with the campy potboiler Lulu Belle. Lenore Ulric stars as a Mississippi nightclub singer who ruins the life of a rising young attorney who falls for her, but realizes in the end that she loves him, too. It runs 461 performances at the Belasco Theatre and is made into a film with Dorothy Lamour.
1962 Already convicted, a man searches for a Signpost to Murder to prove his innocence. Monte Doyle’s thriller runs 419 performances at the Cambridge Theatre in London. Derek Farr and Margaret Lockwood star.
1972 British actor-director Robert Atkins dies at age 85. He performed in and directed many Shakespearean productions for the Old Vic.
1979Alice Delysia, once a major star of London’s West End, dies at age 90. Among the many revues she starred in was On With the Dance, with book and lyrics by Noël Coward.
1984Chita Rivera and Liza Minnelli play mother and daughter in The Rink, John Kander and Fred Ebb‘s musical about a family that runs a roller-skating rink. After five nominations, Rivera wins her first Tony Award for the role. The show runs 204 performances at the Martin Beck Theatre.
2007 British stage actor Ian Richardson, who starred in the BBC’s 1990 drama series House of Cards, and played Jean-Paul Marat in Marat/Sade and Henry Higgins in the 1976 Broadway revival of My Fair Lady, dies at age 72.
2011Keira Knightley and Elisabeth Moss star in Lillian Hellman‘s The Children’s Hour at the Comedy Theatre in London. Knightley plays Karen Wright, and Moss plays Martha Dobie, who together run a girls’ boarding school in 1930s New England, where they become entangled in a story of deceit, shame, and courage when a schoolgirl’s whispers spread, triggering a chain of events with extraordinary consequences.
2016 The world premiere of John Patrick Shanley‘s Prodigal Son opens Off-Broadway at Manhattan Theatre Club. Timothée Chalamet stars as a teenage boy from the Bronx, who is suddenly thrown into the world of a private school in New Hampshire. Robert Sean Leonard co-stars as the boy’s teacher.
Watchas Richard chats with beloved Broadway leading lady, Christy Altomare, who will soon join Seth Rudetsky for two very special concerts on Sunday, February 7 3pm and Monday, February 8 8pm.
1957Cyril Ritchard plays a strange visitor to a Virginia home who claims to be an alien passing judgment on the Earth in Gore Vidal‘s A Visit to a Small Planet. The comedy runs 388 performances a the Booth Theatre.
1959 First play reading at Joe Cino’s Caffe Cino in New York’s Greenwich Village. The space had opened as a bar in December 1958, but under Cino’s flamboyant stewardship, it grows into the cradle of the Off-Off-Broadway movement, providing a launching pad for the earliest works of Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Jean Claude van Itallie, Tom Eyen, and many other playwrights. Its productions examine subjects no commercial producer of the time would touch, especially those with gay themes. After Cino’s suicide in 1967, his circle of theatre artists found Off-Broadway’s Circle Rep.
1971The Trial of the Catonsville Nine plays at the Good Shepherd Faith Church in New York. Saul Levitt and Daniel Berrigan’s play exposing the trial of the Berrigan brothers’ anti-war protests, stars Ed Flanders and Michael Kane. After 130 performances, it transfers to Broadway’s Lyceum Theatre for 29 more showings.
1976 Philadelphia’s Shubert Theatre, acquired by The Academy of Music in 1972 and refurbished, re-opens with a revival of My Fair Lady.
1980 Film star Janet Gaynor makes her Broadway debut in Harold and Maude, opening at the Martin Beck Theatre. The production is panned by critics, and closes two days later.
2012 A revival of Terrence McNally‘s music-kissed biographical drama Master Class, starring Tyne Daly as a late-career diva Maria Callas, opens at the West End’s Vaudeville Theatre. Stephen Wadsworth once again directs Daly in the role, having previously done so in 2010 at the Kennedy Center, and in 2011 on Broadway.
