Issue #33: November 1, 1999

• TV’s Suddenly Susan star Brooke Shields is being wooed to Broadway to perform the role of Roxie Hart in Chicago. However, this would not be her debut on "the great white way." You may remember her in the role of Rizzo in the long running musical Grease a few years ago.

• With the weekly attendance dipping, the producers of the Tony Award-winning musical Ragtime will close the show in January. There is talk that they may reopen six weeks later with a downsized cast and crew or end it entirely. The closing of Ragtime means that Fosse is the only surviving show of Canadian producer Livent Inc. that was bought this year by SFX after financial scandal toppled the once powerful force in the world of live theatre.

• Next year’s Stratford Festival, in Stratford, Ontario, will open on May 29 at the Festival Theatre with a production of the Bard’s Hamlet starring Due South television series star Paul Gross. Also on the bill for the season is the stage version of The Three Musketeers as well as the musical Fiddler On The Roof. In early August Moliere’s Tartuffe will take to the boards. At the Avon Theatre look for productions of As You Like it and a newly reworked The Diary of Anne Frank most recently seen on Broadway. Wrapping up at the Avon is Oscar Wilde’s four-act version of The Importance of Being Earnest. Offerings at the Tom Patterson Theatre include Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Euripedes’ Medea and Elizabeth Rex written by Canadian Timothy Findley, with Paul Thompson. As previously reported in this column American legend Uta Hagen will open at the Tom Patterson Theatre in early August in Collected Stories.

• The Almeida Theatre’s upcoming season contains the Off-Broadway smash Bash (Feb. 2) and the world premiere of the new Harold Pinter play Celebration (March 22). You may recall that the New York Bash production starred Ally McBeal’s Calista Flockhart. Two of the Bard’s plays will run in repertory—Richard II (April 12) and Coriolanus (June 1) which will star the handsome English Patient himself, Ralph Fiennes. There is talk that these plays may make the leap to Broadway soon after they close July 22. Fiennes was last seen on Broadway in the 1995 production of Hamlet, for which he won the Tony Award.

• A $5 million production of the new musical Happy Days, which has toured the UK circuit, will head to Oz to play at Sydney’s Superdome. No date has been set.

• Paul Sorvino, father of Academy Award winner Mira Sorvino, stars in the Broadway premiere of the new musical Abby’s Song at the City Center from November 14–28. You may remember Sorvino as one of the detectives in the early days of the multi-awarding winning television series Law and Order. Sorvino worked alongside co-star Chris Noth before another Broadway veteran, Gerry Orbach, replaced him.