Video: First Look at LEOPOLDSTADT at The Huntington

Get a first look at The Huntington's productio of Leopoldstadt, the poignant and highly acclaimed new play written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Carey Perloff.

roduced in association with DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, Leopoldstadt kicks off the 24-25 Huntington season, running through Sunday, October 13, 2024 at the Huntington Theatre (264 Huntington Avenue).

The latest and most personal masterpiece from Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt is a stirring and epic story of love, family, and enduring bravery. In Vienna, the heart of European culture at the rise of the 20th century, where deep-seated anti-Semitism coexists with a thriving intellectual scene, two brothers have conflicting visions of the future – both for their family and the Jewish people – a tension that will echo through the generations that follow.

Leopoldstadt is the winner of four 2023 Tony Awards, including Best Play, and two 2020 Laurence Olivier Awards, including Best New Play. Its world premiere featured a cast of nearly forty actors, including children, in London’s West End in 2020, pausing during the Covid-19 pandemic, and reopening there in late summer 2021. A year later, the play made its Broadway debut in 2022 and the run was extended due to audience demand through July 2023.

The Huntington’s production marks the very first original American production of the piece. Director Carey Perloff’s three-decade working relationship with Tom Stoppard (along with Harold Pinter) culminated in her recent 2022 book, Pinter and Stoppard, a Director’s View, and will inform and fuel a fresh and personal approach to this striking new Stoppard text.

Leopoldstadt has quickly become recognized as Tom Stoppard’s most personal play. In interviews, he has been very direct in drawing the parallels between the play and his lived experience of not connecting with his own Jewish heritage until later in life. He told The New York Times, “In the final scenes a young Englishman, Leonard Chamberlain, recalling buried memories, comes to accept that he was at one time Leopold Rosenbaum, a boy terrorized by Nazis. This mirrors the true tale of the Czech boy Tomáš Sträussler, whose widowed mother married a British man and had his name changed to Tom Stoppard.”

Tom Stoppard is one of The Huntington’s most-produced playwrights, second only to Shakespeare and August Wilson. Audiences might remember titles including: the very first Huntington production in 1982 – Night and Day, as well as On the Razzle (1984), Jumpers (1987), Travesties (1991), Undiscovered Country (1993), Arcadia (1996), The Real Thing (2005), Rock ‘n’ Roll (2008, also directed by Carey Perloff), and Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead (2019).

The creative team for Leopoldstadt includes scenic design by Ken MacDonald (A Thousand Splendid Suns at ACT), costume design by Alex Jaeger (Prayer for the French Republic at The Huntington), lighting design by Robert Wierzel (The Lehman Trilogy at The Huntington), original music and sound design by Jane Shaw (The Art of Burning at The Huntington), projection design by Yuki Izumihara (desert in at Boston Lyric Opera), and wig and makeup design by Tom Watson (Spamalot on Broadway). The dramaturgs are Charles Haugland and Drew Lichtenberg. The associate director is Dori A. Robinson, with movement by Daniel Pelzig, the fight direction and intimacy coordinator is Jesse Hinson, and the dialect coach is Lee Nishri-Howitt. The production stage manager is Emily F. McMullen and the stage managers are Deirdre Benson, Ashley Pitchford, and Kendyl Trott.

After it’s run in Boston at The Huntington, Leopoldstadt will run at Shakespeare Theater Company in Washington DC from Saturday, November 30 through Sunday, December 29, 2024.

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