Real-life couple Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker are taking their romance to the stage in a revival of Neil Simon’s “Plaza Suite,” Ambassador Theatre Group, Gavin Kalin Productions, and Hal Luftig announced Tuesday.
Two-time Tony winner Broderick and the two-time Emmy winning Parker will star in the first New York revival of Simon’s classic comedy about marriage in a production directed by John Benjamin Hickey. This is also the first time Broderick and Parker have shared the stage since the 1995 Broadway revival of “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
“Plaza Suite” is a set of three, one-act plays about six different characters, including two married couples and another about a movie producer and a married homemaker who were former lovers. The play first opened on Broadway in 1968, directed by Mike Nichols and starred George C. Scott and Maureen Stapleton. It ran for nearly three years and had 1,097 performances. This production of “Plaza Suite” is also the first revival of one of Simon’s plays since he died last August.
The new production of “Plaza Suite,” Broderick and Parker will first travel to Boston for a strictly limited 22-performance, pre-Broadway engagement at the Emerson Colonial Theatre, the same theater where “Plaza Suite” had its 1968 world premiere. It will then play a strictly limited 17-week Broadway engagement at Hudson Theatre on Broadway (141 West 44th Street), with previews beginning on March 13, 2020 with an official opening night set for April 13, 2020.
Broderick won his first Tony for acting in a Simon play when he starred as Eugene Jerome in “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” followed by its sequel, “Biloxi Blues.”
“It was my great good fortune that my very first Broadway play was written by Neil Simon. He also wrote my first film. I owe him a career,” Broderick said. “The theater has lost a brilliantly funny, unthinkably wonderful writer and even after all this time I feel I have lost a mentor, a father figure, a deep influence in my life and work.”
The 1968 production of “Plaza Suite” won a directing Tony for Nichols. In 1971, Simon adapted the play into a screenplay for a film that starred Walter Matthay, Stapleton, Barbara Harris and Lee Grant. In 1982, HBO broadcast a taping of a live stage performance of “Plaza Suite” starring Lee Grant and Jerry Orbach. Then in 1987, Carol Burnett starred in a TV movie adaptation opposite Hal Holbrook, Dabney Coleman and Richard Crenna.
Tickets go on sale to the general public starting at 10 a.m. ET on Sept. 25.
The design team for “Plaza Suite” is two-time Tony Award winner John Lee Beatty (set design), Tony Award winner Jane Greenwood (costume design), five-time Tony Award winner Brian MacDevitt (lighting design), Tony Award winner Scott Lehrer (sound design), and Jim Carnahan (casting director). “Plaza Suite” is general managed by 101 Productions, Ltd.
Additional information, including complete casting, will be announced shortly.