Sometime after Betty and Adolph and long before Hunter and Jeff, another pair of New York actors wrote a musical with juicy roles for themselves and achieved their dream of taking it to Broadway. Not exactly hippies, but inspired by the dramatic possibilities of the flower power movement, bookwriter/lyricists Gerome Ragni'>Gerome Ragni and James Rado'>James Rado devised a story where the former played Berger, a high school student and de facto leader of a tribe of Manhattan hippies, and the latter was his newly-drafted buddy Claude, who can't decide if he should join his friends in burning their draft cards and, if necessary, fleeing to Canada, or comply with his parents' wishes that he go fight in Vietnam for his country.
Bill Kenwright and Marla Rubin announce that they will present the Almeida Theatre production of FESTEN, the hugely successful London play about a family with a dark secret, on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre (239 W. 45th St.), with performances beginning Thursday, March 23. Larry Bryggman, Michael Hayden, Ali MacGraw and Julianna Margulies have been cast in the Broadway production. Directed by Rufus Norris, in a dramatization by David Eldridge from the Danish 1998 film, FESTEN will have its official press opening on Sunday, April 9.
