Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s “The Front Page” will open on Broadway this fall.
The Front Page is a classic comedy set in the reality of Chicago’s newspaper business. By many considered on of the greatest portrayals of the print business, the play debuted on Broadway in 1928 at Times Square Theatre, staged by George S. Kaufman and tapped one of the four major hits in the career of its producer Jed Harris.
The cast will include Nathan Lane as Walter Burns, John Slattery as Hildy Johnson, John Goodman as Sheriff Hartman, Jefferson Mays as Bensinger, Rosemary Harris as Mrs. Grant, and Sherie Rene Scott as Mollie Malloy, with additional casting to be announced.
The Front Page is a story of Chicagoan reporter Hildy Johnson (Slattery) who accidentally discovers the runaway prisoner that became the buzz of Chicago’s Criminal Courts Building’s press room. Hildy and his editor Walter Burns (Lane) conspire to hide the convict form other reporters in order to build the biggest story of their careers.
It will not be the play’s first Broadway revival. During its 1969 run, The New York Times reporter Walter Kerr wrote “This is the kind of playwriting that was thought to be a good kind of playwriting, when the playwrights sat down to write the play, and because it lives right smack up to its own demands, it is beautiful. Broad farce, game farce, hollering farce, exquisitely mechanized farce, and therefore beautiful. A play was held to be something of a machine in those days, something which could be intelligently put together and made to serve a specific function. It wasn’t a machine for making money or scoring points or demonstrating the efficiency of the authors, though it might in passing (hopefully) do those things too. It was a machine for surprising and delighting the audience, regularly, logically, insanely but accountably. A play was like a watch that laughed.”
Produced by Scott Rudin, The Front Page, will feature set design by Douglas Schmidt, costume design by Ann Roth, lighting design by Brian MacDevitt and sound by Scott Lehrer.
Directed by Jack O’Brien production will open on Broadway on Thursday, October 20, 2016, and will play a limited engagement through Sunday, February 5, 2017. The theatre will be announced at a later date.