Roger Rees, Tracey Ullman, Michael McKean & Laura Osnes Will Star in The Band Wagon at Encores!

Roger Rees, Tracey Ullman, Michael McKean and Laura Osnes will join the previously announced Brian Stokes Mitchell in The Band Wagon. Michael Berresse and Don Stephenson will also appear in the 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.

Rees won the Tony for playing Nicholas in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby.  Other Broadway credits The Winslow Boy and The Addams Family. Ullman garnered two Emmys for her work on The Tracey Ullman Show. McKean’s Broadway credits include All The Way, Gore Vidal’s The Best Man and Hairspray. He received an Oscar nomination for A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow. Osnes received a Tony nod for Cinderella. Other Broadway credits include Bonnie and Clyde and Anything Goes. Berresse’s Broadway credits include Kiss Me, Kate, The Light in the Piazza and A Chorus Line. Stephenson’s Broadway credits include The Producers and A Gentleman¹s Guide to Love & Murder.

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, with sets by Derek McLane, costumes by William Ivey Long, lighting by Peter Kaczorowski and sound design by Brian Ronan.

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.