Fontana Wins Drama Desk Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for 'MEMOIRS'!

Santino Fontana is this year's recipient of the 2010 Drama Desk Award for Best Featured Actor in a Play for BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS.

Fontana's Broadway credits include Brighton Beach Memoirs, Billy Elliot, Sunday in the Park With George. Off-Broadway: The Fantasticks (original revival cast), Perfect Harmony. Regional: the title role in Hamlet (Guthrie); Hay Fever (Old Globe); Love's Labor's Lost, On the Verge, 9/11 Project, Once in a Lifetime (Chautauqua Theater Co.); As You Like It, Death of a Salesman, Six Degrees of Separation, A Christmas Carol (Guthrie). Dublin: Death of a Salesman (Gaiety Theatre). Film: Fade to White. Sundance Theatre Lab, 2005; Presidential Scholar in the Arts. BFA, Guthrie/UMN Actor Training Program.

The Neil Simon Plays - Two of Broadway's best-loved masterpieces from America's most treasured playwright, BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS and BROADWAY BOUND played in repertory at the Nederlander Theatre. 

BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS and BROADWAY BOUND were two of the longest running Broadway plays of the 1980s. The works ushered in a new era of appreciation for Neil Simon, with praise for the playwright's hilarious and poignant account of his adolescence, early career and family life in New York in the 1930s and 1940s.

BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS centers on young Jewish teen Eugene Morris Jerome and his extended family living in a crowded home in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn in 1937: his overworked father, Jack; overbearing mother, Kate; his older brother Stanley; Kate's widowed sister Blanche and her daughters, Nora and Laurie. As Eugene spends his time daydreaming about a baseball career, he must also cope with his family's troubles, his awkward discovery of the opposite sex and his developing identity as a writer.

BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS stared Laurie Metcalf (Kate Jerome) and Dennis Boutsikaris (Jack Jerome) with Santino Fontana (Stanley Jerome), Jessica Hecht (Blanche), Gracie Bea Lawrence (Laurie), Noah Robbins (Eugene Jerome) and Alexandra Socha (Nora). BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS originally opened on March 27, 1983 at the Alvin Theatre and played for 1,299 performances. (During the run of BRIGHTON BEACH MEMOIRS, the Alvin Theatre was renamed The Neil Simon Theatre).

Photo Credit: Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.