Multi-award-winning stage and movie stars Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are set to take on the lead roles of Shakespeare's classic play, "Othello," in a new Broadway revival helmed by Tony-winning director Kenny Leon, according to Broadway World.
Washington will be playing the titular character opposite Gyllenhaal's Iago.
Information About Shakespeare's 'Othello' on Broadway
Performances is slated to start in the Spring of 2025 at a currently unspecified Shubert Organization-owned theatre, with backing from "The Wiz" producer Brian Anthony Moreland. More information regarding the casting is yet to be announced.
The upcoming Shakespearean production also marks the first time Washington returned to the Main Stem for about seven years after headlining a 2018 revival of Eugene O'Neill's "The Iceman Cometh."
The "Othello" Broadway project will also see a reunion between Leon and Washington, returning to a director and stage-actor relationship following their work on the Tony-winning stage play "Fences" (2010) and "A Raisin in the Sun."
Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, has had a series of relatively spaced Broadway appearances, starting with his debut performance in 2015's "Constellations," followed up by a return to the Main Stem in the 2017 revival of "Sunday in the Park With George, and capped off by 2019's "Sea Wall/A Life," which was similarly a Tony-winning project produced by Moreland.
Although Shakespeare is a mainstay on Broadway as the playwright's works are on London's West End, the revival still marks a significant length of time between the last staging of the tragedy in 1982, which starred James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer, and the upcoming production.
The play will follow the classic's well-known plotline revolving around its titular character of a Moorish military commander who is slowly duped by his enemy, Iago, through psychological warfare that turns him against his wife, Desdemona.
ARC Casting's Duncan Stewart is in charge of the production's casting, while 101 Productions will act as general manager.
