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    Broadway Revival of ‘Glengarry’ to Star Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr

    A revival of “Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s classic play about unscrupulous real estate agents, is to open next spring.“Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about the world of unscrupulous real estate agents, is returning to Broadway next spring with a starry cast for its seedy offices.Kieran Culkin, boosted to stardom by his role as a scheming son of a media titan in “Succession,” will be featured alongside Bob Odenkirk, the “Breaking Bad” and “Better Call Saul” alumnus, and Bill Burr, one of today’s most successful standup comics.The production — which will be the fourth “Glengarry” outing on Broadway — is to be directed by Patrick Marber, a Tony Award winner for Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt.” Marber was 19 when he saw the first production of “Glengarry” in London in 1983.“Glengarry” is one of the plays that solidified Mamet’s reputation as a great American dramatist. It is an ensemble drama, set in a Chinese restaurant and a real-estate office, about a group of salesman competing to market real estate developments to unwitting buyers.The play arrived on Broadway in 1984, and it won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama that same year. It was adapted as a film in 1992, with a cast led by Al Pacino and Jack Lemmon.The play was revived on Broadway in 2005, with Alan Alda and Liev Schreiber, and again in 2012, with Pacino and Bobby Cannavale.Culkin, who will play Richard Roma, the alpha dog salesman, has appeared on Broadway once before, in a 2014 production of Kenneth Lonergan’s “This Is Our Youth.” Odenkirk will play Shelly Levene, the sad-sack veteran salesman, and Burr takes on the role of Dave Moss, Roma’s blustery rival; they will both be making their Broadway debuts in “Glengarry.” The rest of the cast and the production’s dates have not yet been announced.The 2025 revival is being produced by Jeffrey Richards, who has worked on every previous Broadway production of “Glengarry” and who often produces Mamet’s work on Broadway, as well as by Rebecca Gold, a frequent Richards collaborator. In 2018, Richards and Gold had plans to stage an all-female production of “Glengarry,” and in 2019, Patti LuPone said she was slated to star, but that production never happened.Mamet has become a polarizing figure in recent decades — his later plays have not been well-received, and his rightward political turn has alienated some onetime fans. But his early plays remain admired; most recently, “American Buffalo” was revived on Broadway in 2022, and Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, although critical of Mamet, called the production “electric.” More

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    Darren Criss to Return to Broadway as a Robot in Love

    The actor will star in “Maybe Happy Ending,” an original musical set in a future Seoul. It will begin previews in September.Darren Criss, who parlayed a breakout role on “Glee” into a multifaceted career in television, theater and music, will return to Broadway this fall in a new musical that is nominally about robots but is also about life, love and loss.The show, “Maybe Happy Ending,” is a rarity for Broadway: a fully original musical — not adapted from a pre-existing story or song catalog. Criss will star alongside Helen J Shen and two other actors in the musical, which is set in Seoul in the late 21st century and is about two outmoded helperbots who meet at a robot retirement home and forge a relationship while grappling with their own obsolescence.The musical, by Will Aronson and Hue Park, had an initial Korean-language production in Seoul in 2016, and an English-language production in Atlanta, at the Alliance Theater, in 2020, where Jesse Green, a New York Times chief theater critic, called it “a charming, Broadway-ready new musical about robots in love.”The Broadway production, announced Tuesday, will be directed by Michael Arden, who also directed the Atlanta production, and who last year won a Tony Award for directing a revival of “Parade.” “Maybe Happy Ending” is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 18 and to open Oct. 17 at the Belasco Theater.“It’s a strange, futuristic look at love, with a beautiful score that feels quite classic,” Arden said in a telephone interview. “When I first read it I found it absolutely devastating and heartbreaking and beautiful — it was one of the most human stories I’d come across, even though our leads aren’t human.”Criss, an Emmy winner for “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” last appeared on Broadway in a 2022 revival of “American Buffalo”; he had previously starred in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”“Maybe Happy Ending” will be the first Broadway show for Shen, who is currently in “The Lonely Few” at Off Broadway’s MCC Theater. Criss and Shen will play the robots; the cast will also include Dez Duron, a onetime contestant on “The Voice.”“Maybe Happy Ending” is being capitalized for $18.25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The musical’s lead producers are Jeffrey Richards and Hunter Arnold, who on Friday announced that they are also among the producers of a new Off Broadway play, “N/A,” starring Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe. That play, written by Mario Correa and directed by Diane Paulus, is to begin previews June 11 and to open June 23 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. The play, described in a news release as inspired by real people and events, is about tensions between the first female speaker of the House and the youngest woman elected to Congress; the characters have parallels to Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. More