Shakespeare Theatre Company Reveals Cast & Creative Team For LEOPOLDSTADT

Shakespeare Theatre Company has announced the cast and creative team for Tom Stoppard's Leopoldstadt, directed by Carey Perloff. The show is produced in association with The Huntington, where it completed a record-setting run earlier this month, ending up as one of the top five highest-grossing shows in the theatre's history. The Tony and Olivier Award-winning play will run in STC's Harman Hall from November 30 to December 29.

Leopoldstadt follows a Jewish family as it grows and struggles over the course of nearly 60 years, beginning with their initial assimilation into Viennese culture, negotiating the outbreak of two World Wars through to the aftermath of the Holocaust. Traversing decades of joy and strife, the family strives to maintain their delicate bonds of shared history. Celebrated playwright/director Carey Perloff directs this new arrangement she crafted with Stoppard, bringing to STC “an intensely personal family drama” (Variety) for the holiday season. 

“My mother was a Viennese refugee who fled the Nazis in March 1938, so Stoppard's gorgeous and heartbreaking play has enormous resonance for me personally,” says Perloff. “I'm honored that The Huntington and Shakespeare Theatre Company have given us the chance to stage the first American production, and having had a wonderful run in Boston, I'm excited to bring this trenchant story to the city where I grew up. Leopoldstadt is a play about a complicated Jewish family, and about the choices we make and fail to make in our attempts to survive and to preserve our culture. It is also Stoppard's most deeply personal play, in which he reckons with the impact of his own Jewish heritage on his life and work, and he has been a crucial part of our collaboration throughout the process.”

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.”

The co-production brings together a large ensemble cast that includes numerous recognizable actors from both Washington and Boston. STC welcomes back to its stage familiar names to the D.C. community Samuel Adams (Red Velvet), Firdous Bamji (Much Ado About Nothing, Richard II, and more), Sarah Corey (Much Ado About Nothing), and Maboud Ebrahimzadeh (Here There Are Blueberries). In addition, the cast includes two of STC's Academy graduates who have performed extensively throughout D.C., Anna Theoni DiGiovanni and Rachel Felstein. 

Cast members making their STC debut include Joshua Chessin-Yudin, Samuel Douglas, Rebecca Gibel, Phyllis Kay, Adrianne Krstansky, Brenda Meaney, Nael Nacer, Anna Slate, and Mishka Yarovoy.

The cast is joined by six young local actors playing the child roles in alternating performances of the show: Harrison Morford, William Morford, Teddy Schechter, Adrianna Weir, Mila Weir, and Audrey Ella Wolff . 

Understudies for the production include Jacob Schmitt and Jackie Scholl.

The creative team for this production includes Scenic Designer Ken MacDonald, Costume Designer Alex Jaeger, Lighting Designer Robert Wierzel, Sound Designer/Composer Jane Shaw, Projection Designer Yuki Izumihara, and Wig and Makeup Designer Tom Watson. 

Also working with the cast are Daniel Pelzig for Movement, Fight Director and Intimacy Coordinator Jesse Hinson, Vocal/Dialect Coach Lisa Beley, and Dialect Coach Lee Nishri-Howitt.

The Production Stage Manager is Laura Smith, with Assistant Stage Managers Anthony O. Bullock and Rebecca Talisman.

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