Jude Law in new Donmar season

Donmar Warehouse artistic director Michael Grandage has announced his final season, starring Jude Law, Ruth Wilson, Douglas Hodge and Eddie Redmayne.

Michael Grandage will end his 10 year stewardship of the Donmar Warehouse in London’s Covent Garden this year with an impressive season of big-hitting plays.

Stepping down from the role in December 2011, Grandage has maintained critical and audience success at the Donmar, and ensured that the small venue continues to punch far above its weight.

His final season kicks off with a new production of Eugene O’Neill’s epic, Pulitzer prize winning play Anna Christie (from 8 August 2011) starring Ruth Wilson and Jude Law, and directed by Donmar associate Rob Ashford. Design is by Paul Wills, whose Donmar productions include The Man Who Had All The Luck and Novecento.

Both Jude Law and Ruth Wilson are returning to the Donmar after performances in 2009: Law in Hamlet for the Donmar West End season and Ruth Wilson in A Streetcar Named Desire.

Also in the season is a revival of Inadmissible Evidence (from 13 October 2011) by John Osborne, which will see Douglas Hodge star in Jamie Lloyd’s new production, designed by Soutra Gilmour.

Douglas Hodge, who returns to the Donmar after the venue’s West End production of Guys and Dolls and The Collection/The Lover, will play Bill Maitland, a middle aged lawyer struggling to avoid the harsh truths of his life and keep a hold on reality. He is currently starring in La Cage Aux Folles on Broadway.

Finally, Eddie Redmayne returns to the theatre following his Olivier and Tony Award-winning performance in Red, to play the title role in Shakespeare’s Richard II (from 1 December 2011). Michael Grandage will direct, making this his final production at the Donmar whilst as artistic director, with design by Richard Kent.

Other highlights for the Donmar in 2011 include:

• A US tour of Michael Grandage’s current Donmar production of King Lear, playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (from 28 April 2011) and starring Derek Jacobi and Gina McKee.
• Securing the lease of the main Earlham Street venue and also purchasing a new rehearsal, education and office space in Covent Garden to help grow and secure the organisation.
• Michael Grandage’s acclaimed 2008 production of Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden to be produced for BBC Radio 3 (broadcast 13 March 2011 at 8pm), reuniting the original cast including Margaret Tyzack and Penelope Wilton.

Shows coming up at the theatre ahead of Grandage’s final season include musical comedy The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee; Harold Pinter’s Moonlight starring David Bradley, Deborah Findlay and Daniel Mays; and Michael Grandage directing Felicity Jones in Schiller’s Luise Miller.

No announcement has yet been made as to Grandage’s successor at the Donmar Warehouse.

MORE ON MICHAEL GRANDAGE

Michael Grandage’s previous work at the Donmar includes King Lear, Red (also Broadway – Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Best Director of a Play), The Chalk Garden (Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Director), Othello (Evening Standard Award for Best Director), John Gabriel Borkman, Don Juan in Soho, Frost/Nixon (also West End and Broadway), The Cut, The Wild Duck (Critics’ Circle Award for Best Director), Guys and Dolls (Donmar in the West End – Olivier Award for Outstanding Musical Production), Grand Hotel (Evening Standard Award for Best Director, Olivier Award for Outstanding Musical Production), Henry IV, After Miss Julie, Caligula (Olivier Award for Best Director) and The Vortex. As part of the Donmar in the West End season Grandage directed Ivanov – Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Director, Twelfth Night, Madame de Sade and Hamlet (also Kronborg Castle and Broadway). Other West End work includes Evita. He was the Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres 1999 – 2005, where his many productions included Don Carlos (Evening Standard Award for Best Director).

Grandage took over as Artistic Director of the Donmar Warehouse in November 2002. Between 2002 and 2012 Grandage will have presented seventy productions. Under his leadership, the company have garnered over eighty major awards including Oliviers, Tonys, Critics’ Circle and Evening Standard Awards. For Grandage personally this includes, Tony and Drama Desk Awards for Best Director of a Play for Red, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Director for Ivanov, Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Best Director for The Chalk Garden, Evening Standard Award for Best Director for Othello, Critics’ Circle Award for Best Director for The Wild Duck, Olivier Award for Outstanding Musical Production for Guys and Dolls, Evening Standard Award for Best Director and Olivier Award for Outstanding Musical Production for Grand Hotel, and Olivier Award for Best Director for Caligula.

From 2000 to 2005 he served as Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres where he produced over 40 plays with predominantly young directors and designers. His own work there included Richard III with Kenneth Branagh, Edward II with Joseph Fiennes, The Tempest with Derek Jacobi and an award- winning production of Don Carlos which transferred to the West End.

LINKS

Donmar Warehouse website

Passion at the Donmar Warehouse – Reviews Round-up

Passion at the Donmar Warehouse – Reviews Round-up

Passion is not the easy crowd-pleaser with which many thought the Donmar would choose to celebrate Stephen Sondheim’s 80th year. But it is certainly a powerful, though-provoking piece, and one which allows director Jamie Lloyd to team up again with Elena Roger following their 2008 success with Piaf.

Critics hail Elena’s performance as another triumph for the actress who continues to choose brave, demanding roles. Much praise is also heaped on the other strong supporting performances, notably David Thaxton and Scarlett Strallen, if not universally for the musical itself.

Read extracts from Passion reviews below, including The Times, The Telegraph, The Observer and The Guardian.

Donmar announces 2011 season

The Donmar Warehouse in London has announced its 2011 season, including a revival of Harold Pinter’s Moonlight, the UK premiere of Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Beeand Felicity Jones in Schiller’s Luise Miller.

Michael Grandage, artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden, has announced the venue’s new 2011 season.

Tony-award winning Broadway musical The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee will open at the London venue on 11 February 2011.The hit show, about six teenagers competing in an American spelling competition, has a book by Rachel Sheinkin and music and lyrics by William Finn. The musical will be directed by Jamie Lloyd, who opens his new production of Sondheim’s Passion this week at the Donmar, starring Elena Roger.

The new season will also feature Harold Pinter’s 1993 play about a dysfunctional family, Moonlight, which will receive its first major London revival, directed by Bijan Sheibani (7 April to 28, May 2011).

Finally, the season ends with up-and-coming actress Felicity Jones, who recently starred in Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant’s movie Cemetery Junction, in a new version of Schiller’s Luise Miller, from 8 June. The play will be directed by Michael Grandage and adapted by Mike Poulton. No stranger to the Donmar, Felicity appeared in their acclaimed 2008 production of The Chalk Garden.

Also, as previously announced, the new season will open with Derek Jacobi giving his King Lear, following his hugely successful Donmar West End performance as Malvolio in Twelfth Night in 2009. The production will also star Gina McKee.

ELENA ROGER in Passion

Argentinean actress continues to forge acclaimed career

By the time 2012 is out, Elena Roger is going to be considerably more famous than she is now.

That’s because Michael Grandage’s 2006 production of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita is to be revived on Broadway in Spring 2012 starring Roger as Eva Peron, and joined by Latino superstar Ricky Martin as Che.

The Argentinean actress won an Olivier award for her role in the show – and if the reaction to her London performance in that role is anything to go by, America is going to fall in love with her.

She followed Evita in London with a 2009 Olivier Award win for her performance as Edith Piaf  in the Jamie Lloyd directed Piaf at the Donmar Warehouse and in the West End.

And she is about to return to the Donmar to star in a revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Passion alongside Scarlett Strallen and David Thaxton, again directed by Jamie Lloyd.

The show is part of the Donmar’s celebration of Stephen Sondheim’s 80th birthday, that will also include concert performances of Merrily We Roll Along and Company at the Queen’s Theatre, featuring members of the original Donmar productions including Anna Francolini, Adrian Lester, Clive Rowe, Michael Simkins and Sophie Thompson in Company and Daniel Evans, Julian Ovenden and Samantha Spiro in Merrily We Roll Along.

Elena Roger’s other credits include Matthew Warchus’s Boeing Boeing, and in her native Buenos Aires she played Nine, Beauty and the Beast, Les Misérables, Saturday Night Fever and Mina, che cosa sei, with director Valeria Ambrosio.

Links:

News: West End Evita to transfer to Broadway

Donmar Warehouse

Polar Bears – Donmar Warehouse – Review

Mark Haddon leapt to prominence with his 2003 award-winning novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, written from the perspective of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome. For his playwrighting debut he tackles another mental health problem and the effect it has not only on the sufferer but also on her nearest and dearest.

Told in intentionally jumbled flashback, it seems, at first, that it’s Richard Coyle’s John (a gentle, loving philosophy lecturer) who’s the one with psychiatric problems as he confronts his wife Kay’s horrified brother Sandy with the news that she’s lying dead in the cellar – and that he was the one who killed her. But as Haddon tracks the relationship from the couple’s first meeting, delving into the siblings’ childhood on the way, he exposes the psychological weaknesses of all his characters.

Despite the smart suit, well paid job and unseen trophy wife, the sadistic tendencies Paul Hilton’s Sandy exhibited as a little boy still lurk just below the harshly practical surface of the grown man. And Kay’s mother (a taut Celia Imrie) may, too, have exacerbated the bipolar predisposition her daughter inherited from her suicide father.

Nobody does anguish better than Jodhi May and she touchingly conveys the contrast between Kay’s apparent creative highs and her paralysed depressive lows. But the wayward script tends to get sidelined, introducing a Jesus like character who turns out to be a former lover and straying into self-indulgent dissemination of information which does little to flesh out the characters.

Jamie Lloyd’s well-acted 90-minute production benefits from Soutra Gilmour’s shattered, distancing design, and certainly has its arresting moments, but ends up struggling with a not altogether convincing depiction of a damaged and damaging reality.

Louise Kingsley. Courtesy of This Is London.

Friend comes out for West End

Hollywood heart-throb Rupert Friend will star in new Tony award-winning comedy The Little Dog Laughed, at the Garrick Theatre in London from 8 January 2010. He will be joined by film and TV stars Gemma Arterton and Tamsin Grieg.

The play by Douglas Carter Beane is about Hollywood film actor Mitch, played by Friend, who is determined to come out of the closet against the wishes of his lean, mean, brash and crass agent (Greig). A love triangle ensues when Mitch falls for a rent boy who has a girlfriend (Arterton).

Gemma Arterton makes her West End stage debut in the play after a heady few years of high-profile film and TV parts including Quantum of Solace, The Boat That Rocked and St Trinian’s.

Rupert Friend has also become one of the UK’s highest profile young stars with a number of choice film roles including The Young Victoria and Cheri.

Tamsin Grieg is best known for TV comedies Green Wing and Love Soup, and has also appeared in numerous film, TV and stage roles.

The play opened in January 2006 off-Broadway and the UK premiere will be directed by Jamie Lloyd, who is experienced at star vehicles having recently directed James McAvoy in Three Days of Rain.

The New York Times said of the comedy that it’s, “the tastiest homegrown comedy of manners to hit New York since, well, Mr. Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown.”

SPECIAL OFFER: Save £12 on tickets to The Little Dog Laughed at the Garrick Theatre London (valid Monday to Thursdays until 21 January)