A meet-cute musical about two 20-somethings on their way to a wedding (his dad is marrying her sister — it’s complicated) will add some song-and-dance to a play-heavy season on Broadway this fall.
“Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)” is small — just the pair of performers — and, according to reviews of several prior stagings, charming.
The show began its life in 2019 with a different title — “The Season” — and a couple of runs in England — at the New Wolsey Theater in Ipswich and at Royal & Derngate in Northampton. A new, retitled version arrived at the Kiln Theater in London in 2023, and then transferred to the West End the next year; earlier this year, it ran at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 1 and to open Nov. 20 at the Longacre Theater. It will star Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for playing the title role in the London production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” and Christiani Pitts, who last starred on Broadway in an ill-fated musical adaptation of “King Kong.” Tutty has been with the production since its London run; Pitts joined in Cambridge.
The show is about a sweet young English cinema usher who flies to New York to attend the second wedding of his estranged father; the bride asks her sister, an American barista, wry by comparison, to pick him up. The two of them spend two days exploring New York, and getting to know each other, before the ceremony. In Britain, The Telegraph called it “a total charmer,” while The Independent said the show “captures all the messiness of being in your twenties without a plan, showing how big cities can crush anyone naïve enough to see them as a pretty backdrop to their dreams.”
The show’s book and music are by Jim Barne and Kit Buchan and it’s directed and choreographed by Tim Jackson. The producers are Kevin McCollum, Tim Johanson, Glass Half Full Productions and Jamie Wilson Productions.
Michael Paulson is the theater reporter for The Times.
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