Michael Learned will join Philip Bosco and Fritz Weaver in Second Coming, a new drama by David Shaber which may reach Broadway this season, said producer Lee Moskof.
The political drama about two governmental operators hopelessly addicted to the game of politics is loosely based on former president Richard Nixon and John Mitchell. Bosco will play the Mitchell role to Weaver's Nixon. Learned plays an Ivy League society lady attached to Mitchell. The action takes place some 10 years after the Watergate scandal.
Mitchell, Nixon's attorney general, was sentenced to a jail term for his involvement in the Watergate cover-up. Nixon resigned the presidency.
Moskof told Playbill On-Line (Sept. 21) that the play would not make it to New York this season, as originally planned, due to the unavailability of a suitable theatre.
Shaber is primarily know for his film work, including the screenplay for the Sean Connery-Alec Baldwin thriller The Hunt for Red October. John Tillinger, who helmed the Tony Randall-Jack Klugman Broadway remounting of The Sunshine Boys, will direct. Learned is best known for her role in the long-running television series "The Waltons." In 1993, she appeared on Broadway in The Sisters Rosensweig, replacing Jane Alexander. Other credits include a turn in Arthur Miller's The Ride Down Mt. Morgan at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in 1996.
Currently co-starring in the limited-run Broadway production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center, Bosco was seen on the New York stage in the "Encores!" concert series' February production of Strike Up the Band. His latest long run on Broadway was in Ken Ludwig's farce Moon Over Buffalo, which later became the subject of the D.A. Pennebaker-Chris Hegedus documentary Moon Over Broadway. Weaver is another theatre veteran with credits stretching back even farther than Bosco's. He made his Broadway debut in 1955 in The Chalk Garden and has appeared in such productions as The Crucible and, more recently, The Professional at Circle Rep in 1995.
-- By Robert Simonson
