“The Sound of Music,” among the best-known and most-loved of American musicals, will return to Broadway next spring, nearly seven decades after its first staging.
The production will be directed by Lear deBessonet and presented by Lincoln Center Theater — the team behind the “Ragtime” revival that earlier this month won the Tony Award for best musical revival.
DeBessonet, beginning her second season as the artistic director of Lincoln Center Theater, said that the nonprofit organization this fall would also stage a Broadway revival of “A Few Good Men,” the military drama that propelled Aaron Sorkin’s career as one of the nation’s most influential screenwriters.
Both shows are best known from their film adaptations. “The Sound of Music,” with songs by Rodgers and Hammerstein, first ran on Broadway in 1959; the film, in 1965, is an American classic starring Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer. “A Few Good Men,” written by Sorkin, first ran on Broadway in 1989; the film, also written by Sorkin and featuring an all-star cast including Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson, was released in 1992.
“The Sound of Music” revival, with previews beginning on March 23 and an opening on April 15, will star Jasmine Amy Rogers as Maria, the singing governess whose arrival transforms a motherless family in Nazi-era Austria. Rogers burst onto Broadway in last year’s “Boop! The Musical,” and has been much in-demand since, starring in an Off Broadway production of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee” and an Encores! production of “The Wild Party” and booking a role in this fall’s Broadway revival of “School Girls; or, The African Mean Girls Play.”
“A Few Good Men,” about a court-martial case against two Marines accused of murder, will begin previews on Oct. 8 and open on Oct. 29. It will be the first Broadway play directed by Michael Arden, who won Tony Awards for directing the musicals “Parade” and “Maybe Happy Ending.” The cast will include Bradley Whitford, a longtime Sorkin collaborator who was a replacement cast member in the original production, and Tom Blyth, best known for “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes.”
Both shows will be staged at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont Theater, which is one of the six Broadway houses run by nonprofits. “Ragtime,” which began performances at the Beaumont last September, is scheduled to conclude its run there on Aug. 16.
DeBessonet, in an interview, described “A Few Good Men” as “about state-sanctioned violence,” but praised the play for its nuance, saying, “I actually found the questions that the show is asking very complicated in a really dynamic, interesting way.” She said Sorkin would be making small changes to the script, which she called “finessing of dialogue.”
As for “The Sound of Music,” deBessonet said she had first seen the film when she was a 3-year-old in Baton Rouge, La., and had wanted to direct it since she was 5. She described the stage version as darker and more political than the film; the show was last staged on Broadway in 1998.
“It’s a story that is about an authoritarianism regime encroaching, and it is a story in which we are holding both the epic and the personal,” deBessonet said. “It has the story of a family that is dealing with grief and brokenness and needs to heal set against a very specific historical backdrop and the experience of feeling that encroachment coming and the questions of what do you choose to believe and how much do you activate.”
DeBessonet said Lincoln Center Theater this season plans a full complement of shows, on and off Broadway. Among its Off Broadway productions will be this summer’s production of “The Whoopi Monologues,” directed by Whitney White and featuring Kerry Washington, Kara Young, Dominique Fishback, Kecia Lewis and Danielle Pinnock; a fall revival of August Wilson’s “Seven Guitars,” directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson; and, next spring, a new play by Kimberly Belflower, “Born in the Dirt,” directed by Danya Taymor. (Belflower and Taymor collaborated last year on the Broadway play “John Proctor Is the Villain.”)
The theater also plans to present Matthew Rhys in a one-man show, “Playing Burton,” that he previously performed in Wales; the piece, about the actor Richard Burton, was written by Mark Jenkins and this production will be directed by Bartlett Sher. The timing has not yet been announced.
As part of its LCT3 program for emerging artists, Lincoln Center Theater plans two plays: “Creation Stories and All the Important Importants,” written by Mfoniso Udofia and directed by Tamilla Woodard, and “Pretend It’s Pretend,” written by Emma Watkins and directed by Annie Tippe.
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