Roundabout Brings THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST to Bway 2011; Tony Winner Brian Bedford Leads

Roundabout Theatre Company will welcome back Tony Award® winner Brian Bedford in Oscar Wilde's comic play The Importance of Being Earnest.

Directed by and starring Brian Bedford as "Lady Bracknell," the production will begin in winter 2011 at the American Airlines Theatre on Broadway. This will be a limited engagement.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival produced a production of The Importance of Being Earnest in 2009 directed by and starring Brian Bedford.

Additional cast members and the creative team will be announced shortly.

The Importance of Being Earnest is a glorious comedy of mistaken identity, which ridicules codes of propriety and etiquette. Dashing men-about-town John Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff pursue fair ladies Gwendolen Fairfax and Cecily Cardew. Matters are complicated by the imaginary characters invented by both men to cover their on-the-sly activities - not to mention the disapproval of Gwendolen's mother, the formidable Lady Bracknell.

Wilde's classic production premiered in 1895 at the ST. James Theatre in London offering a stinging critique of love, sex and social hypocrisy that remains relevant today.

Brian Bedford returns to Roundabout Theatre Company after memorable performances as "Orgon" in Tartuffe, "Sir Harcourt Courtly" in London Assurance and "Sganarelle" in The Molière Comedies.

Roundabout subscribers have first access to tickets. To sign up for Roundabout's email club, visit www.roundabouttheatre.org. Single Tickets will be available to the general public in the fall of 2010.

The Importance of Being Earnest will play Tuesday through Saturday evening at 8:00PM with Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:00PM.

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival presented an acclaimed production of The Importance of Being Earnest, directed by and starring Brian Bedford, in 2009.

Brian Bedford (Director, Lady Bracknell). One of the most acclaimed actors of our time, Brian Bedford studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where his classmates included Peter O'Toole, Albert Finney and Alan Bates. At age 21, he played Hamlet for the Liverpool Repertory Company, which led to highly successful performances in London's West End and at Stratford-upon-Avon, working with, among others, Sir John Gielgud and Peter Brook. Gielgud's productions of Peter Shaffer's first play, Five Finger Exercise, brought him to Broadway, where he has subsequently starred in over 20 productions, receiving six Tony nominations for Best Actor and winning the award for Moliére's The School for Wives. Other honors include the Obie, Outer Critics Circle Award, N.Y. Drama Desk Award and the L.A. Drama Critics Award. Mr. Bedford has directed and acted at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles, the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and, for over 27 seasons, at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival of Canada. His one-man Shakespeare show The Lunatic, the Lover and the Poet and his Oscar Wilde evening Ever Yours, Oscar have taken him around the world. Mr. Bedford has made numerous appearances on television and film, and supplied the voice of the title character in Walt Disney's Robin Hood. A resident of North America for the past 50 years, in 1997 he was inducted into the American Theatre Hall of Fame.

Roundabout Theatre Company is one of the country's leading not-for-profit theatres. The company contributes invaluably to New York's cultural life by staging the highest quality revivals of classic plays and musicals as well as new plays by established writers. Roundabout consistently partners great artists with great works to bring a fresh and exciting interpretation that makes each production relevant and important to today's audiences.

Roundabout Theatre Company currently produces at three permanent homes each of which is designed specifically to enhance the needs of the Roundabout's mission. Off-Broadway, the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, which houses the Laura Pels Theatre and Black Box Theatre, with its simple sophisticated design is perfectly suited to showcasing new plays. The grandeur of its Broadway home on 42nd Street, American Airlines Theatre, sets the ideal stage for the classics. Roundabout's Studio 54 provides an exciting and intimate Broadway venue for its musical and special event productions. Together these three distinctive venues serve to enhance the work on each of its stages.

American Airlines is the official airline of Roundabout Theatre Company. Roundabout productions are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts; and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation.

Roundabout Theatre Company's 2009-2010 season includes Noël Coward's Present Laughter starring Victor Garber, directed by Nicholas Martin; Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Sondheim on Sondheim starring Barbara Cook, Vanessa Williams and Tom Wopat; Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie, directed by Gordon Edelstein; Terrence McNally's Lips Together, Teeth Apart, starring Megan Mullally, Patton Oswalt and Lil Taylor, directed by Joe Mantello. Roundabout's sold out production of The 39 Steps begins an off-Broadway run in March 2010 after two successful years on Broadway.

For additional information, visit www.roundabouttheatre.org.