Kristin Chenoweth to Star in Stairway to Paradise Revue at Encores!

Kristin Chenoweth will star in Stairway to Paradise, an original Encores! production celebrating the great Broadway revue, which will conclude the 2007 season at New York City Center. Directed by Tony Award-winner Jerry Zaks, Stairway to Paradise has music direction by Rob Berman and choreography by Warren Carlisle. It will play for six performances, from May 10 to 14.

The 2007 Encores! season celebrates the great Broadway revue, an entertainment form of plotless, bookless sketch-driven shows that flourished from just before 1900 until the early '50s. In honor of the 100th anniversary of the first Ziegfeld Follies, Encores! is presenting Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's Follies, Irving Berlin and Moss Hart's Face the Music and, finally, Stairway to Paradise.

Stairway to Paradise, the first-ever specially created Encores! production, will include numbers and sketches from such classic Broadway shows as The Band Wagon, As Thousands Cheer, Pins and Needles, Call Me Mister, The Garrick Gaieties, New Faces of 195 and other legendary musicals and revues of the era. Such classic songs as "Manhattan," "Brother Can You Spare a Dime," "This is the Army Mr. Jones," "Suppertime" and "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" will be featured.

Chenoweth recently returned to Broadway in the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of The Apple Tree in a trio of roles she first played for Encores! in May 2006, a limited engagement that will run through March 11 at Studio 54. She appeared in a solo concert at the Metropolitan Opera on January 19. Other Encores! performances include On A Clear Day You Can See Forever and Strike Up The Band. She won a Tony Award for You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown and was nominated for a Best Actress Tony as Glinda the Good Witch in Wicked. Other Broadway credits include Epic Proportions and Steel Pier. Off-Broadway credits include Scapin, A New Brain, Dames at Sea and The Fantasticks. She performed Bernstein's Candide with the New York Philharmonic. Television credits include The West Wing, The Music Man, Frasier, Annie, Sesame Street and her own series Kristin for NBC. Film credits include Deck the Halls, Stranger Than Fiction, RV, Bewitched, Running with Scissors and The Pink Panther. She is scheduled to make her Metropolitan Opera debut in March 2010 as Samira in John Corigliano's The Ghost of Versailles.