 Transfers... "Pin It")
The Times‘ ArtsBeat has been full of big Broadway news over the last 24 hours, from the confirmation of months-old speculation that The 39 Steps would follow Avenue Q to the Off-Broadway multiplex New World Stages, to news of two eagerly-anticipated transfers. Firstly, Million Dollar Quartet, which starts previews at the Nederlander Theater on March 13 and opens April 11 and recreates the legendary 1956 jam session (pictured) between Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, will keep the four lead actors from its Chicago run and add Broadway vets Hunter Foster as producer Sam Phillips, and Elizabeth Stanley as Elvis’s girlfriend.
Another show about a burst of intense creativity is headed for the Great White Way from London, The Pitman Painters, based on a book by William Feaver about miners who decide to become artists. That show opens in September at the Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theater. And finally, ArtsBeat touches on rumors that Red, a play about American Modernist painter Mark Rothko starring Alfred Molina (most recently as the father in An Education), may also be making the cross-Atlantic leap in the spring.
And while I’m at it, from The L‘s theater inbox, comes this Off-Off-Broadway news: Young Jean Lee’s sold-out Lear at Soho Rep just got extended another eight days, to February 14.