Tony Winner Brian Stokes Mitchell Will Star in The Band Wagon at Encores! City Center

Tony winner Brian Stokes Mitchell will star in The Band Wagon, an Encores! special event based on the classic movie of the same name. Directed and choreographed by Kathleen Marshall, the production will play a limited engagement November 6 through November 16 at City Center.

Mitchell won the Tony for Kiss Me Kate. Other Broadway credits include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Man of La Mancha, King Hedley II and Ragtime.

The Band Wagon is a classic backstage musical: A washed-up Hollywood star trying to make a comeback by doing a Broadway show, a British director who is a genius but has no business directing a musical, a leading lady who’s never done a show before, and a composer and a lyricist who are at each other’s throats. All the things that could never happen in the New York theater today.

The production will have a book by Douglas Carter Beane, adapted from the screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with music by Arthur Schwartz and lyrics by Howard Dietz. Music direction will be by Todd Ellison.

Comden and Green, Broadway’s ultimate insiders, penned the 1953 film using Schwartz and Dietz’s songs to tell their story. The movie took its title from the famed 1931 Broadway revue written by Schwartz, Dietz, and George S. Kaufman.