Tonys 2008: The con is on
Our pal Michael Riedel of the New York Post reports that Oscar winner Kevin Kline is to play the title role in a limited Broadway run of "Cyrano de Bergerac" this fall with Jennifer Garner as the beguiling Roxanne. Kline, already the winner of two Tonys for musicals, was nominated as lead actor in a play for his last appearance on Broadway -- as Falstaff in the 2004 Lincoln Center production of "Henry IV." Garner's stage work is more limited –- she understudied two roles in a 1995 revival of Turgenev's "A Month in the Country" headlined by Tony nominee Helen Mirren. That production also featured Ron Rifkin, who would later play Garner's nemesis on "Alias."
For her return to the Rialto, Garner has picked a popular classic. The Edmond Rostand play about a poet with a prominent proboscis premiered more than a century ago, in 1898, and has since been revived on Broadway 11 times. Jose Ferrer won the first best actor Tony for playing the part back in 1947 and went on to win an Oscar three years later for recreating the role on film. And Christopher Plummer picked up a Tony for the musical version in 1974. The last revival was the 1984 RSC production with Derek Jacobi.
Riedel also reports that the long talked about revival of the Rodgers and Hart musical "Pal Joey" –- the 1940 tuner that launched the career of Gene Kelly –- may be rolling into the Roundabout Theater's Studio 54 next spring. At one point, the rumor mill had Harry Connick, Jr. and Glenn Close, co-stars in the 2001 TV version of "South Pacific," as the young song and dance man and his older lover. Now the buzz is that "Jersey Boys" Tony winner Christian Hoff and Stockard Channing could be cast in these plum parts.
And Norbert Leo Butz, who won a Tony in 2005 for playing one of the "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels," is set to star as a artist who fakes his own death in the first production of the recently discovered Mark Twain play "Is He Dead?" This satire is set to begin previews at the Lyceum on Nov. 8 with opening night set for Nov. 29.
