Tom Stoppards Leopoldstadt Will Open on Broadway This Fall – The New York Times

Leopoldstadt, Tom Stoppards much-heralded and uncharacteristically personal play about an early-20th-century Jewish family in Vienna, is coming to Broadway in September, bringing an unusually large cast and a pointed reminder of the perils of antisemitism to the New York stage.

Stoppard, 84, is one of the great dramatists of recent decades; his four best play Tony Awards, for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Travesties, The Real Thing and The Coast of Utopia, are the most of any playwright in Tonys history. Leopoldstadt will be the 19th production of a Stoppard play on Broadway since 1967.

Leopoldstadt, which begins in 1899 and continues through, and past, the two World Wars, chronicles 50 years in the life of one family. It is inspired by, but does not depict, Stoppards own family history; he was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937, but fled to Asia with his family when he was a toddler, has spent much of his life in Britain, and only learned some details of his heritage in the 1990s.

Its two extraordinary hours where you go through this time and this exploration of a family: what they have to face, and how they come out the other side and deal with their past, cope with their present and think about their future, said Sonia Friedman, a lead producer. Being Stoppard its complex, but also incredibly emotional.

The Broadway production, with a cast of 38, is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 14 and to open Oct. 2 at the Longacre Theater. Friedman, who produced the Tony-winning best plays of the last three seasons before the pandemic, is producing Leopoldstadt with Roy Furman, another Broadway veteran, and Lorne Michaels, the Saturday Night Live creator.

Leopoldstadt began its life with a production in Londons West End in 2020 directed by Patrick Marber, which won praise from the New York Times critic Ben Brantley; that run, which was cut short by the coronavirus pandemic, won the Olivier Award for best new play. The play then returned to the West End last year for a brief but profitable run.

In New York it is again being directed by Marber, who also directed the last Broadway production of a Stoppard work, a 2018 revival of Travesties. In a phone interview, Marber said that he was looking forward to a third go at the material, following the London runs.

Its a surprisingly enjoyable play to direct even though its very painful and sad, its also full of lightness and laughter, he said. Its fundamentally about memory, and time and love. But its also about fascism and immigrants and refugees. Its about everything its Stoppard.

Marber said that Stoppard has continued revising the play for New York, where he said he expects the play to resonate differently because of the ongoing war in Ukraine. With any play, whats happening in the real world affects the way you watch it, he said. Different things will pop out.

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Tom Stoppards Leopoldstadt Will Open on Broadway This Fall - The New York Times