Kevin Spacey to Bring Misbegotten to B'way with Brit Co-Stars Best and Meaney

Howard Davies' acclaimed London revival of Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten, which is currently running at the Old Vic through December, is headed to Broadway. Stars Kevin Spacey, Eve Best and Colm Meaney will recreate their roles for the New York mounting, which will open at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre on April 9, 2007, according to the Associated Press.

In the show, Spacey a two-time Oscar winner for The Usual Suspects and American Beauty plays James Tyrone Jr., a role he first played on Broadway in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night in 1986 opposite Jack Lemmon. He was last seen on Broadway in Davies' staging of O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh, which earned him a Tony Award nomination. He won a Tony in 1991 for his work in Neil Simon's Lost in Yonkers. Other Broadway credits include Ghosts and Hurlyburly. This production of A Moon for the Misbegotten kicked off Spacey's third season as artistic director of the Old Vic.

Award winning British stage star Best starred in Mourning Becomes Electra, directed by Davies, at the National Theatre in a production that won her the Critics' Circle Award for Best Actress. Last year she won the same award again, plus the Olivier and Evening Standard Awards, for her performance in the title role of the Almeida production of Hedda Gabler that subsequently transferred to the West End's Duke of York's. Her other London credits include Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia trilogy and The Cherry Orchard at the National, as well as the National Theatre production of Three Sisters. For her role in 'Tis Pity She's A Whore at the Young Vic, she earned the Evening Standard and Critics' Circle Newcomer Award. This will mark Best's Broadway debut.

Another Broadway newcomer, Meaney is best know for his role as Miles O'Brien in TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Prior to A Moon for the Misbegotten, Meaney was seen on the London stage in a revival of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock at the Donmar Warehouse in 1999. He is also known for his roles in such films as Layer Cake, The Boys and Girl from County Clare and Intermission.

In A Moon for the Misbegotten, Josie Best, a woman with a ruined reputation who lives in a dilapidated Connecticut farmhouse with her father Meaney, falls in love with James Tyrone Jr. Spacey, a third-rate actor whose dreams of stardom were washed away by alcohol. This will be the fifth Broadway production for the play, which first premiered in 1957. Gabriel Byrne and Cherry Jones last headlined a 2000 revival of the show at the Walter Kerr Theatre.

In his positive Theatre.com review of the show, Matt Wolf said: “Moon lands Spacey squarely in the middle of terrain for which he is quite simply tailor-made, playing an older, even more self-loathing version of the same character, James Tyrone Jr., whom he first acted twenty years ago in the Jack Lemmon/Jonathan Miller Long Day's Journey into Night. Factor into the mix the ceaselessly amazing Eve Best, a veteran of Davies's major O'Neill reclamation with Mourning Becomes Electra, and you have an evening comprised of fearless talents facing head-on a play steeped in the redemptive power of love and yet, at bottom, deeply, unutterably sad."

Preview performances for A Moon for the Misbegotten are set to start March 29.