The Globe and Mail, August 22, 2007
Plummer returning to festival as Caesar
By: Michael Posner
The Stratford festival is going high-profile in casting for its 2008 production of George Bernard Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra. Veteran stage, film and TV star Christopher Plummer has signed to appear as Julius Caesar, opposite Anika Noni Rose as Cleopatra.
Rose won a Tony award for her performance in the hit show Caroline or Change, and praise for her portrayal of pop singer Lorrell Robinson in the movie Dreamgirls.
At the same time, the festival announced that it will mount both of its two musicals at the Avon Theatre - Meredith Wilson's The Music Man and John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret. Both have strong Broadway pedigrees.
The Globe and Mail has learned that company actor Jonathan Goad, who appeared this season as Iago in Othello, will star in The Music Man as Harold Hill.
First mounted on Broadway in 1957, and later a hit film, The Music Man will be directed by Susan H. Schulman, who directed To Kill a Mockingbird this season and, several seasons ago, a memorable production of Fiddler on the Roof.
Cabaret will be directed by Amanda Dehnert, resident director at Trinity Repertory Company in Providence, R.I., where she has directed such shows as The Fantasticks, My Fair Lady and West Side Story. The lead role of Sally Bowles has not yet been cast.
Caesar and Cleopatra will be directed by the festival's co-artistic director, Des McAnuff. "Caesar and Cleopatra is a play Christopher Plummer has wanted to do for some time and I fell in love with that idea," McAnuff says. "I think it's a terrific part for him."
This will be the third production of a Shaw play at Stratford. It staged Saint Joan, in 1975, and Arms and the Man, in 1982.
Plummer last appeared at the Stratford Festival in 2002 in a production of King Lear that went on to New York's Lincoln Center.