Broadway's OSLO to Be Adapted to Big Screen; Bartlett Sher to Direct

While Lincoln Center's production of Oslo does not officially open until tonight, The Hollywood Reporter reports that Tony Award winning director Bartlett Sher (FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, SOUTH PACIFIC, THE KING AND I) will helm a big screen adaptation of the critically acclaimed play, with Marc Platt producing. Playwright J.T. Rogers will adapt his own script for the project which will also mark Sher's directorial film debut.

Rogers tells THR that his initial plan was to pen Oslo for film but ultimately decided to write it as a play. "It's such a verbal and idea-driven story, but also a visually-compelling one," he explains. "I always thought that in the back of my mind, it'd be fascinated to Pivot and come at it from a very different way. I'm excited to bring back parts I had to cut from the play, and add things like shots of men and women arriving from the Middle East after riding all night in a taxi. Images like that are powerful to this story."

The play, which had a sold-out run last summer at off-Broadway's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, will premiere in London later this year when it is produced by the National Theatre. The show is set to open on September 5 at the National's Lyttleton Theatre before transferring to the West End where it will begin performances on October 10 at the Harold Pinter Theatre.

A darkly comic epic, Oslo tells the true but until now untold story of how one young couple, Norwegian diplomat Mona Juul (Jennifer Ehle) and her husband social scientist Terje Rod-Larsen (Jefferson Mays), planned and orchestrated top-secret, high-level meetings between the State of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which culminated in the signing of the historic 1993 Oslo Accords. Featuring dozens of characters and set in locations across the globe, Oslo is both a political thriller and the personal story of a small band of women and men struggling together-and fighting each other-as they seek to change the world.

Photo Credit: T. Charles Erickson