The Roundabout Theatre Company has just announced the casting for a new production of Pal Joey. Christian Hoff (Jersey Boys) will play Joey Evans, a lowlife nightclub entertainer who wants to own his own business. Stockard Channing (she's still got it) will play an older, married woman who he tries to seduce so she'll give him money to start his nightclub. Martha Plimpton (a two-time Tony nominee but we'll always remember her from the Goonies) will play Gladys Bumps, a chorus girl who dislikes Joey. Pal Joey was originally written as a series of awkwardly written letters published in The New Yorker in the late 1930s. The story takes place in Chicago.  read more »

Seems like Showtime's Weeds stars have caught the stage bug recently. First, Hunter Parrish makes his Broadway debut in Spring Awakening on Aug. 18. Now Mary-Louise Parker, the MILF who plays his drug-dealer mom on Showtime's Weeds, will trot back onto Broadway too. She'll star in a revival of Henrik Ibsen's classic Hedda Gabler in January 2009 for the Roundabout Theatre Company. Previews are slated to begin on Jan. 6 2009 with an official opening on Jan. 25.

Playbill has more:

In Hedda Gabler, press notes state,"the newly-wed Hedda Tesman finds herself bored with married life to her scholar husband, George Tesman.

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“The minute they asked me to do it, I thought, well these people are smart,” said Jason Fuchs, the 21-year-old stage and screen actor. “They recognize Jason Fuchs!” he joked, explaining his interest in starring in the Roundabout Underground’s production of Speech & Debate, currently playing until Dec. 16.

Staged by Jason Moore, the Tony-award winning director of Avenue Q, Speech & Debate focuses on three outsider-y students forced to form a speech and debate team while grappling with their sexual secrets in the doldrums of Salem, Ore.

Diwata (played by the Philly-based actress Sarah Steele) is one of those eccentric theater types who has her own blog and podcast, on which she performs songs about the high school theater teacher being a “crap sandwich” for not casting her in the school’s production of “Once Upon a Mattress.” Howie (played by Gideon Glick, who was Ernst in the Tony-winning original cast of Spring Awakening) is the new kid. Transplanted from Portland, he has been out since elementary school and wants to form a Gay Straight Alliance group. Mr. Fuchs plays Solomon, a nerdy student who wears his shorts a little too high, babbles with a slight lisp and takes competition and school work just a little too seriously (think of a less-rageful version of Reese Witherspoon’s Tracy Flick in 1999’s Election). Solomon is doggedly researching an article for the school newspaper about a town sex scandal and doesn’t know when to stop asking questions.  read more »

The New York Times' Ben Brantley shares his thoughts on Claire Danes' "game, conscientious" portrayal of Eliza Doolittle and Jefferson Mays' version of Henry Higgins as a "squalling, solipsistic infant trapped inside a worldly man's body" in the Roundabout Theater Company's Pygmalion.

Perhaps the kindest way to think about David Grindley's misfired revival of ''Pygmalion,'' which opened last night at the American Airlines Theater, is that it was devised to soothe the restless spirit of the ever-contentious Shaw. For there is not a whisper of mutual attraction between this production's Eliza and Henry, played by Claire Danes and Jefferson Mays. As for the prospect of marriage: ''Not bloody likely,'' as Eliza would say. How can you imagine two people sharing a life when they don't even seem to share a stage?

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