Victoria Clark has signed on to star Marc Blitzstein and Joseph Stein's Juno, the second Encores! production of the 2008 season. Directed by Tony Award winner Garry Hynes, with guest music direction by Eric Stern and musical staging by Warren Carlyle, Juno will play for five performances, from March 27 to March 30, at New York City Center. This will be the first production since the original Broadway staging in 1959 to use orchestrations by Blitzstein, Hershy Kay and Robert Russell Bennett.
Juno is based on the 1924 play Juno and Paycock by Sean O'Casey, which chronicles the disintegration of an Irish family in Dublin in the early 1920s during the confrontation between the Irish Republican Army and the British. Clark plays the title role, a hardworking matriarch who struggles to hold her family together in the face of war, betrayal and her husband's drinking. The musical originally opened on Broadway at the Winter Garden Theater on March 9, 1959, starring Shirley Booth and Melvyn Douglas and played a total of 16 performances. Songs include "I Wish It So," "We're Alive" and "One Kind World."
Clark won the Best Actress Tony Award for her performance in The Light in the Piazza and appeared on Broadway in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Cabaret, Urinetown Titanic, A Grand Night for Singing and Guys and Dolls. She portrayed Sally in last season's acclaimed Encores! production of Follies and has recently released the solo CD Fifteen Seconds of Grace.
