The delay in opening, according to a press notice, is to "allow leading cast member Richard Easton, who plays Russian landowner Alexander Bakunin, the appropriate amount of time to recover from a procedure he received earlier this week to correct a heart arrhythmia." Easton, as previously reported, became ill during the show's second preview on Oct. 18, which was subsequently cancelled. His understudy, David Manis, has been performing the role of Alexander Bakunin since that time.

Easton is scheduled to return to the production within the next two weeks.

The Coast of Utopia, which boasts a cast of 44, also stars Billy Crudup, Jennifer Ehle, Josh Hamilton, David Harbour, Jason Butler Harner, Ethan Hawke, Amy Irving, Brían F. O'Byrne and Martha Plimpton.

The Coast of Utopia is centered on the political and philosophical idealism and debates of mid-19th-century Russia, examining the movements that excited artists and thinkers in those days. The show moves chronologically on from the 1830s, when the great Romantic poet Pushkin was still alive and his epic poem "Eugene Onegin" was all the rage in educated circles.

Jack O'Brien, the Broadway director of Hairspray, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, Henry IV and The Invention of Love, helms the New York bow of the nine-hour Coast of Utopia triptych.