Broadway.com has learned that Jeff McCarthy will join Kerry Butler and Matthew Morrison in the Broadway-bound musical version of The Opposite of Sex at the Magic Theatre in San Francisco this fall. Tony winner Karen Ziemba is also in talks to appear in the tuner.
McCarthy has appeared on Broadway in Zorba, Pirates of Penzance, Smile, Side Show, Urinetown and Beauty and the Beast. His off-Broadway credits include Sympathetic Magic and Dream True. Regionally he has appeared in Arms and the Man, The Misanthrope, Henry IV, Sunday in the Park, A Lie of the Mind, Mack and Mabel and The Music Man.
Ziemba received the Tony, Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for her performance in Contact. She has also appeared on the Great White Way in Steel Pier for which she received Tony, Drama Desk, Outer Critics' Circle nominations, Chicago, Crazy for You, 42nd Street, A Chorus Line and Never Gonna Dance for which she won an Outer Critics Circle Award and received her third Tony nomination. Her off-Broadway credits include a Drama Desk-winning turn in And The World Goes 'Round, I Do! I Do!, Allegro and Encores! mountings of Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, The Pajama Game and Bye Bye Birdie.
The Opposite of Sex features music and lyrics by Douglas J. Cohen and a book by Robert Jess Roth and Douglas J. Cohen and is based on Don Roos' screenplay for the 1998 film of the same name. The Opposite of Sex is about 16 year-old girl Dede Truitt, who has a dead stepfather and an emotionally unstable mother. She decides to make a break for it, moves in with her gay half-brother Bill and seduces his hot boyfriend Matt. And that's only the beginning. McCarthy is to play the Sheriff who goes in search of Dede and Matt when they run off. Ziemba would play Lucia, Bill's uptight best friend who is skeptical of Dede.
Directed by Roth who directed McCarthy in Beauty and the Beast, the show is scheduled to run in California from September 25 through October 24 before a possible Broadway berth.