Issue #53: October 1, 2000

• Starring in the revival of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal is Juliett Binoche, the beautiful movie star of The English Patient. Her co-stars are Live Schreiber of the Scream movies and John Slattery of television’s Sex and The City. November 14 is opening night at the American Airlines Theatre.

• A date has been set for the Broadway debut of Mamma Mia! Now that all those Cats have left the building, the Winter Garden Theatre will be cleaned up and refurbished in time for an October 18, 2001 opening of this Abba musical.

• A limited engagement of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love will be produced by Lincoln Center Theatre, at a yet to be announced Broadway theatre, in March. First presented in London in 1997, The Invention of Love made its U.S. debut in January in San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theatre starring James Cromwell.

• Tom Selleck will make his stage debut in a revival of the 1962 play A Thousand Clowns which is being mounted at Duke University Theater Previews in Durham, N.C. Following the February 7 to 25 engagement, there will be a four-city tour before opening on Broadway April 16 for a limited run.

• Trevor Nunn’s National Theatre revival of The Merchant of Venice finished filming a television version at the end of June. Henry Goodman’s Olivier Award-winning performance as Shylock will be broadcast in Britain next Easter on BBC2 and will probably be picked up by the U.S. Public Broadcasting Corporation at a later date. This the third time one of Nunn’s productions has been filmed for television or video, the other two were Othello and Porgy and Bess.

• The debut of The Wild One in Melbourne, Australia is set to open in late December. Based on popular Oz rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Johnny O’Keefe who emerged from Sydney’s music scene in the 50s. He later became a television star whose alcohol and drug addiction led to his death in 1978 at the age of 43.

• Given the above theatre news, it looks like another wave of television and film stars are strutting their stuff on the Broadway stage this fall. In previous columns I reported the short stint by Kelsey Grammer of Frasier in a short-lived production of Macbeth. Recently an Off Broadway production of High Infidelity starred Morgan Fairchild and John Davidson. Cheryl Ladd took over from Tony Award-winner and Broadway vet Bernadette Peters in Annie Get Your Gun. Now Baywatch’s David Hasselhoff takes over the long running Jekyl & Hyde and Lea Thompson of Caroline in the City can be seen in Cabaret. This strategy by producers tries to extend the life of their productions — sometimes it works, some times it doesn’t.