OH MY GOD I AM SO EXCITED. This cast looks incredible.
When I see the phrase "the ____ estate", I imagine a vast mansion in the country full of monocled men and high-collared women receiving letters about productions across the country and doing spit-takes at whatever they contain.
-Kad
This is some pretty great casting. Love the idea of Jessie Mueller as Helena.
I am a firm believer in serendipity- all the random pieces coming together in one wonderful moment, when suddenly you see what their purpose was all along.
So glad the Joel Grey Chairman rumors proved false.
"You travel alone because other people are only there to remind you how much that hook hurts that we all bit down on. Wait for that one day we can bite free and get back out there in space where we belong, sail back over water, over skies, into space, the hook finally out of our mouths and we wander back out there in space spawning to other planets never to return hurrah to earth and we'll look back and can't even see these lives here anymore. Only the taste of blood to remind us we ever existed. The earth is small. We're gone. We're dead. We're safe."
-John Guare, Landscape of the Body
I guess this means they will either be recasting or putting the very much hoped for transfer of Into the Woods on hold until later in the season (or, to be really pessimistic, it won't actually happen)
Eh, a bit disappointed. With the casting of Chita, I thought it would be a more diverse cast. And besides that, there aren't any character actors compared to the original cast. Looks like another pretty, white cast to me.
Does anyone else remember Jana Schneider, Helena Landless in the OBC? She was just wonderful in that role--from Wisconsin, I think, but she gave that role an exotic spiciness and her voice was lovely. She went on to be a war photographer/correspondent and fell on hard times. But she was fabulous in that role and I believe was nominated for a supporting Tony. I also loved Cleo Laine as Puffer in the OBC--her original background in the British music halls really suited that role, especially in "The Wages of Sin." She and George Rose were fab playing together.
Oh PLEASE shut the F up. Just so you know, there ARE in fact good "white" actors. Not every cast needs to have a set number of every ethnic minority in order to meet some quota. I'm so sick and tired of hearing this.
As Rupert Holmes notes in the script, Neville and Helena Landless are supposed to be from Ceylon (modern day Sri Lanka) but do not need to actually be played by actors of that ethnicity. In the context of the show, Neville and Helena are played by Victor Grinstead and Janet Conover, who are members of the company of the Music Hall Royale and would have been, assumably, English themselves. That's not to say that they have to be white, but it doesn't mean that they have to look like they're actually from Ceylon. It's supposed to be a British acting troupe's representation of what they though the people of Ceylon were like (ie, the characterizations are typically pretty over-the-top), so Karl and Mueller are fine casting. It's really a great company as a whole, I think. My one curiosity is which version of the script they'll be using.
"Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos."-Stephen Sondheim
There are a handful of different accents and dialects in the show: British, Cockney, and then the Ceylon accent, which Helena refers to in the script as "geographically untraceable".
"Art, in itself, is an attempt to bring order out of chaos."-Stephen Sondheim