The Front Page will star Nathan Lane as Walter Burns, John Slattery as Hildy Johnson, John Goodman as Sheriff Hartman, Jefferson Mays as Bensinger, Holland Taylor as Mrs. Grant, and Sherie Rene Scott as Mollie Malloy, with additional casting to be announced.
The show is set in the press room of Chicago's Criminal Courts Building which is buzzing with reporters covering the story of an escaped prisoner. When star reporter Hildy Johnson (Slattery) accidentally discovers the runaway convict, he and his editor Walter Burns (Lane) conspire to hide the man from the other reporters, while they chase the biggest scoop of their careers.
No doubt Walter would inform me that you, my impatient audience, have already stopped reading by now. But though 'The Front Page' is all about the adrenaline rush that turns journalists into deadline junkies, it's hard to work up the proper urgency about Jack O'Brien's production. So to finish the thought I started before I so rudely interrupted myself, the latest edition of 'The Front Page' is ... diverting. Pretty darn good. At moments, very funny indeed.
This production, happily, fires on all cylinders. We can't exactly call the cast of twenty-one (plus bit player/understudies) an all-star cast; they are not, all, what we might consider stars. But they are comic all-stars, anyway. To say that Walter Burns-that iconic, hard-boiled city editor who set the mold for hard-boiled city editors on stage and screen for the last eighty-eight years-is played by Nathan Lane is to give you a pretty good idea of what director Jack O'Brien has in mind. No matter that Lane doesn't enter, in the flesh, until well into the evening; his presence permeates the play from the moment we hear him bellowing over a battered and bruised candlestick phone.
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