November 12, 1999
By Michael Riedel
Broadway has pretty much run out of musicals to revive, so now it's on to plays.The latest entry in the blast-from-the-past category: Tom Stoppard's 1984 comedy The Real Thing, which will be resurrected in April at the Belasco, theater sources confirmed yesterday.
This production, directed by David Leveaux, arrives in New York via London, where it opened earlier this year to critical hosannas at the Donmar Warehouse. The English cast, largely unknown on these shores, includes Stephen Dillane as an acid-tongued playwright and Sarah Woodward as his wife [they got that sort-of wrong, Sarah Woodward plays Henry's first wife] (Jeremy Irons and Glenn Close played those roles in the original production, which was directed by Mike Nichols).
The Belasco is still in play for a limited 13-week run of The Dead, which wraps up its sold-out run at Playwrights Horizons Nov. 28. But if the show turns out to be a big hit and is extended, it will have to find another theater before The Real Thing takes up residence in the spring.
The Real Thing is one of six plays being revived on Broadway this season. The others are N. Richard Nash's creaky The Rainmaker, Arthur Miller's compelling The Price, Peter Shaffer's dazzling Amadeus, Sam Shepard's disturbing True West and Eugene O'Neill's great A Moon for the Misbegotten, starring Cherry Jones.
And then there is Noel Coward's Waiting in the Wings [with Rosemary Harris, Jennifer Ehle's mother]. It is not quite a revival, since it has never been staged on Broadway. But calling it a new play is a stretch (there are so many old-timers in the cast, auditions must have been held at the Actors' Home).
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