Murphy, Baranski, Bosco, Etc. Join Encores! Follies

More stars have signed on to the eagerly awaited Encores! staged concert of the Stephen Sondheim-James Goldman classic Follies, presented from February 8th through 11th, 2007 at City Center.

Joining the previously-announced Tony Award-winner Victoria Clark (The Light in the Piazza, Titanic) as Sally Durant Plummer will be Tony Award-winner Donna Murphy (upcoming LoveMusik, Wonderful Town) as Phyllis Stone, Michael McGrath (Spamalot, Wonderful Town) as Buddy Plummer, Tony Award-winner Philip Bosco (Heartbreak House, Lend Me a Tenor) as Dimitri Weismann, Robert Fitch (...Forum, The Will Rogers Follies) as Theodore Whitman, Tony-winner Christine Baranski (Kennedy Center Mame and Sweeney Todd, Rumors, "Cybill") as Carlotta Campion, Lucine Amara as Heidi Schiller, Joanne Worley (On the Twentieth Century Actors' Fund concert, "Laugh-In") as Stella Deems, Gerry Vichi (Annie Get Your Gun, How to Succeed) as Max Deems, Arthur Rubin as Roscoe, Yvonne Constant (The Gay Life, La Plume de Ma Tante) as Solange, Leena Chopra as Young Heidi, Dorothy Stanley (Sweeney Todd, La Cage aux Folles) as Dee Dee West and Diane J. Findlay as Sandra Cranes.

As previously announced, Casey Nicholaw (The Drowsy Chaperone) will direct.  Eric Stern will offer musical direction and John Lee Beatty will serve as scenic consultant.

The concert will mark the full-scale New York presentation of Sondheim's score for Follies in more than two decades.  Follies concerns two couples--both comprised of former Weismann Girls and their stage door Johnnies--who confront the ghosts of the past while at a reunion for the soon-to-be demolished theatre where the Follies once took place. 

"We'll open the season with Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's Follies. For many theatergoers of my generation, Follies was a first exposure to this kind of material, as Stephen Sondheim wrote brilliant pastiches of songs from the teens, '20s and '30s in the style of Gershwin, Berlin and Porter. We'll begin with those wonderful re-imaginings, and spend the season delving back into the originals," previously said Encores! artistic director Jack Viertel.  Next season, Encores! will celebrate the golden age of the Broadway revue; the other shows include Irving Berlin's Face the Music and Stairway to Paradise, celebrating "the very best material from a half century of Broadway revues, and will include numbers and sketches from Florenz Ziegfeld's shows and other legendary musicals and revues of the era."

The original production of Follies starred Dorothy Collins, Alexis Smith, John McMartin and Gene Nelson.  It opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 4th, 1971 to run for 522 performances, and was revived on Broadway by the Roundabout Theatre Company in 2001.  

Face the Music will run March 29th through April 1st, while Stairway to Paradise will be presented from May 10th through 14th.

Visit www.nycitycenter.org for tickets and more information.