CHATTER: Bagert Bringing PICNIC & KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN Back to Bway?

Broadway producer Darren Bagert has just revealed that there are plans to bring both PICNIC and KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN back to the Great White Way. The Tony-winner mentioned in a recent statement that a revival of PICNIC will arrive on Broadway in the 2011-12 season, featuring direction by Sam Gold. Additionally, Jose Rivera and Allan Baker are working on a new adaptation of SPIDER WOMAN, which is also scheduled to make it to Broadway in the 2011-12 season. Peter DuBois is on board to direct the production.

Picnic premiered at the Music Box Theatre in 1953 in a production by The Theatre Guild, directed by Joshua Logan, and ran for 477 performances. The original cast featured Ralph Meeker, Eileen Heckart, Arthur O'Connell, Janice Rule, Reta Shaw, Kim Stanley and Paul Newman. Inge won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the work, and Logan received a Tony Award for Best Director.

The 1983 stage play Kiss of the Spider Woman was an adaptation of Manuel Puig's same title novel by the author himself. Novelist, screenwriter and playwright Manuel Puig wrote two plays while living in exile. The first was a dramatised version of his 1976 novel El beso de la mujer araña (Kiss of the Spider Woman), written in 1983 and first staged in London in 1985 at the Bush Theatre, in an English language version by translator Allan Baker, starring Mark Rylance and Simon Callow. Baker's version was revived in April 2007 at the Donmar Warehouse with Rupert Evans as Valentin and Will Keen as Molina.