Ebersole, O'Donnell & Leavel Up for Encores! Line-Up of Applause, Juno & Nanette

The City Center Encores! series has announced plans for its 2008 season. First up in February is two-time Tony Award winner Christine Ebersole Grey Gardens as Margo Channing in the Applause, the musical version of All About Eve, followed by Juno and No, No, Nanette, featuring Rosie O'Donnell and Tony winner Beth Leavel The Drowsy Chaperone. Also announced is the appointment of Rob Berman as music director for the season.

Originally created around star Lauren Bacall, Applause opened on Broadway at the Palace Theatre on March 30, 1970, won the Tony Award for Best Musical and ran for 866 performances. Featuring music by Charles Strause, lyrics by Lee Adams and a book by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, it moves the plot of All About Eve into the 1970s, but still concerns the great Broadway star Margo Channing and her duplicitous understudy Eve Harrington. With Ebersole as Channing a role originated on film by Bette Davis and played on Broadway by Bacall, Arlene Dahl and All About Eve's Anne Baxter, Applause will run from February 7 to 10.

A musical version of Sean O'Casey's 1924 play Juno and the Paycock, Juno will run from March 27 to 30 under the direction of Tony winner Garry Hynes The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Translations. Chronicling the disintegration of an Irish family in Dublin during the confrontations between the Irish Republican Army and the British, Juno opened at the Winter Garden Theatre on March 9, 1959, starring Shirley Booth and Melvin Douglas, and played only 16 performances. It features music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein and a book by Joseph Stein. The Encores! staging will be the first to restore the original Broadway orchestrations by Blitzstein, Hershey Kay and Robert Russell Bennett.

O'Donnell and Leavel will team up for the light-hearted musical comedy No, No, Nanette from May 8 to 12, under the direction of Walter Bobbie. Based on the comedy My Lady Friends by Frank Mandel and Emily Nyitray, it's a musical filled with millionaires, misunderstood wives, innocent young girls, beautiful women and betrayal, with lots of tap dancing. No, No, Nanette has had two major Broadway productions; the show originally opened in 1925, and was revived and reconceived in 1971 in a production supervised by Busby Berkeley and adapted and directed by Bert Shevelove. Encores! will present the 1971 version of the show, which has music by Vincent Youmans, lyrics by Irving Caesar and Otto Harbach and book by Harbach.

All Encores! performances will be presented at New York City Center.