Sierra Boggess, Hugh Panaro & Carolee Carmello Headline Broadway Bound REBECCA Reading 3/18

Sierra Boggess (The Little Mermaid), Hugh Panaro (currently starring in the title role in The Phantom of the Opera) and Carolee Carmello (The Addams Family) will headline an upcoming industry reading of the Broadway-bound musical REBECCA on Friday, March 18 in New York, directed by Tony Award winner Michael Blakemore and Francesca Zambello.  

The producers of REBECCA are Ben Sprecher and Louise Forlenza for Global Broadway Productions and Norton Herrick for Herrick Entertainment.  The cast for the reading will also include James Barbour, Anastacia Barzee, Don Stephenson, William Youmans and John Horton. 

REBECCA features original book and lyrics by Michael Kunze, music by Sylvester Levay, English book adaptation by two-time Tony Award winner Christopher Hampton (Sunset Boulevard), English lyrics by Hampton and Kunze, and direction by Blakemore (Kiss Me, Kate; City of Angeles; Noises Off) and Zambello (Little Mermaid). 

Based on the classic Daphne Du Maurier novel (and later turned into an Oscar-winning film by Alfred Hitchcock), REBECCA is the story of Maxim de Winter (Hugh Panaro), his new wife (Sierra Boggess) and Mrs. Danvers (Carolee Carmello), the housekeeper of his West Country estate of Manderley – where the memory of his first wife, the glamorous and mysterious Rebecca, still casts a shadow.

REBECCA had its world premiere in 2006 at Vereinigte Buhnen Wien in Vienna, where it played to sold-out houses totaling more than three years.  It is currently playing in Budapest, Hungary; Helsinki, Finland; and at the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo.  An additional production will open in Stuttgart, Germany in November 2011 with productions currently planned for Russia and beyond.