Helen Mirren will return to Broadway in February as Queen Elizabeth II in Peter Morgan's The Audience. Previews for the limited engagement at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre begin February 17, 2015 with opening night set for March 8. The production runs through June 28, 2015.
Mirren is quite familiar with the role of England's long-reigning present monarch. After her Academy Award and BAFTA-winning performance as Elizabeth II in Morgan's 2006 movie "The Queen," she starred in a 2013 run of The Audience in London, for which she received the Olivier Award for Best Actress in a Play.
Two-time Tony Award winner and Oscar nominee Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot, "The Reader"), who directed the West End production and was most recently represented in London by the also-Broadway-bound revival of David Hare's Skylight, returns for The Audience's Broadway premiere. The rest of the cast and crew is yet to be announced.
The play imagines the private audiences between the Queen and her respective Prime Ministers, from Winston Churchill to David Cameron. According to press notes, "each Prime Minister uses these private conversations as a sounding board and a confessional--sometimes intimate, sometimes explosive. In turn, the Queen can't help but reveal her own self as she advises, consoles and, on occasion, teases."
Though a major star of stage and screen, Helen Mirren has appeared on Broadway only twice before--in 1995 in Turgenev's A Month in the Country (set for an Off-Broadway revival this winter starring Taylor Schilling and Peter Dinklage) and in 2002 in Strindberg's Dance of Death.
Reviewing the London production last year in the New York Times Ben Brantley called Mirren "unimpeachably authoritative" and noted her "admirably centered and engaged performance that gives shadow as well as substance to her physically exact portrayal of Elizabeth through the ages."
Tickets go on sale tomorrow, September 12, at Telecharge.
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