This press release was sent to us today from The Acting Company:
Four-time Tony Award winner Angela Lansbury makes a return to the Broadway stage heading the cast of This is on Me, An Evening of Dorothy Parker, a staged reading adapted by Tom Fontana to benefit The Acting Company on Sunday, November 5, 7 pm at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 West 45th Street. Boyd Gaines, Harriet Harris, Lisa Banes and Lynn Collins complete the cast.
Tickets are available ($85.00, $100.00 and $250.00) and may be purchased from Telecharge, 212-239-6200. For Gala Benefit tickets, call 212-258-3111.
Tom Fontana (Emmy winning writer/producer of Oz, Homicide and St. Elsewhere) has adapted this evening of plays, poems, stories, essays, songs and patter of the wittiest woman in America and First Lady of the Algonquin Round Table. Fontana is a Board Director of The Acting Company. Warner Shook, former Artistic Director of the Intiman Theatre in Seattle will direct. A Gala Cast Supper follows for Benefactors and Patrons. The evening is made possible through the support of The Shubert Organization and Sony Corporation of America.
“I’ve been Mame Dennis, Mama Rose, and Mrs. Lovett, why not Dorothy Parker,” quipped Ms. Lansbury who chairs the Actors Advisory Board of The Acting Company, founded in 1972 by her longtime friend, John Houseman and current Producing Artistic Director, Margot Harley.
Harriet Harris (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Desperate Housewives) and Lisa Banes (Arcadia, Desperate Housewives) began their careers on tour with The Acting Company as did fellow alums Kevin Kline, Patti LuPone, Jeffrey Wright, Jesse L. Martin, Hamish Linklater, Stephen DeRosa, Henry Stram, David Ogden Stiers, Tom Hewitt, David Schramm, and Rainn Wilson.
Boyd Gaines (Twelve Angry Men, Contact) has appeared in several Acting Company Salon staged readings. Lynn Collins (Al Pacino’s Merchant of Venice and NYSF’s As You Like It) made her Broadway debut in The Women.
Recipient of a Tony Honor for Excellence in Theater, Obie, Audelco and Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards, The Acting Company has toured 125 productions across America and to nine foreign countries. Its renowned education programs — master classes, student matinees and weeklong Literacy Through Theater artistic residencies — reach 25,000 students a year, most in schools where little or no other arts education is available.