Once Broadway-Bound Syncopation to Land at Hartford Stage

By Robert Simonson
24 Jan 2005

Allan Knee's Syncopation, which was at one time aimed at the 2004-05 Broadway season, will see the lights of Hartford Stage instead, the playwright told Playbill.com columnist Harry Haun.

"Hartford Stage wants to do it now in the fall or spring—I'm hope they're going for the fall—with as many people who were going to be in the New York production as we can get," said Knee. "We're going to call Neve Campbell to see if she'd still be interested and, hopefully, Michael Hayden, and possibly John O'Connell, who did `Strictly Ballroom,' as a choreographer. John Tillinger directing, and so on."

On Broadway, Syncopation was to have starred Campbell and Hayden.

Producer Vaud E. Massarsky announced in a statement at the time, "Unfortunately, some of the financing did not come through and it is with great sadness I announce that Allan Knee's beautiful play Syncopation, will not get to Broadway this season as we had hoped."

The dance-inspired romance between two blue-collar New Yorkers would have begun previews at the Longacre Broadway theatre Oct 2.

The plot of the play follows the romance of "an impassioned meat packer and a soul-searching seamstress in turn of the century Manhattan." The two find love in a dance studio in the Lower East Side. "As the characters change and grow," reads press material, "their relationship shifts not unlike the syncopated beats of the ragtime music that accompanies them."

Allan Knee wrote the book for the current Broadway musical Little Women.

Syncopation premiered at the Long Wharf Theater in 1999. David Chandler and Lorca Simons starred in that staging. A production at The George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, NJ, followed.

In spring 2000, Syncopation was on the fast track for an Off-Broadway mounting, but a theatre logjam scotched those plans. At the time, the project had different producers, Ted Tulchin and Kenneth Waissman, and a different director, Pamela Berlin.