Costumer Aldredge Has Another Best Man in Her Future | Playbill

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News Costumer Aldredge Has Another Best Man in Her Future Back in 1960, fresh from her very first Broadway job -- designing the costumes for Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth -- Theoni V. Aldredge went to her next Broadway assignment: Gore Vidal's The Best Man. Four decades -- and several Tonys -- later, Ms. Aldredge finds herself fitting out another Best Man, this one due at Broadway's Virginia Theatre Sept. 5.

Back in 1960, fresh from her very first Broadway job -- designing the costumes for Tennessee Williams' Sweet Bird of Youth -- Theoni V. Aldredge went to her next Broadway assignment: Gore Vidal's The Best Man. Four decades -- and several Tonys -- later, Ms. Aldredge finds herself fitting out another Best Man, this one due at Broadway's Virginia Theatre Sept. 5.

Winner of Tonys for her work on La Cage aux Folles, Annie and 42nd Street, Aldredge will again find herself costuming a relatively large cast for a straight play: 17 actors, with six leads: Charles Durning, Spalding Gray, Chris Noth, Elizabeth Ashley and Christine Ebersole.

Durning's many theatre credits include the recent Broadway revivals of The Gin Game and Inherit the Wind, as well as last spring's Glengarry Glen Ross at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton, NJ. Ashley is well known for her turns in Tennessee Williams plays, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Suddenly Last Summer and The Red Devil Battery Sign.

Noth is the former star of "Law & Order" and now star of "Sex & the City." Ebersole, who plays his wife, was recently on view in David Marshall Grant's Off-Broadway play, Current Events, at Manhattan Theatre Club. Ebersole's career has included Broadway turns in Getting Away With Murder, Harrigan-n-Hart, Camelot (Richard Burton), Oklahoma and On the 20th Century. She has appeared in the Encores! musical concert series in Ziegfeld Follies of 1936, Lady In the Dark and Allegro.

The last time Gray appeared on a New York stage as part of anything other than one of his well-known and popular monologues, was as the Stage Manager in the Lincoln Center Theater production of Our Town in 1989. In Best Man, Gray is to play presidential candidate William Russell to Durning's President Hockstader. Ashley is best known for several Broadway turns in the plays of Tennessee Williams, including Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Suddenly Last Summer. She recently appeared at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre in Sweet Bird of Youth and in Off-Broadway's If Memory Serves.

The Virginia Theatre booking for Best Man is a bit a surprise, given the venue's reputation as a musical house. The theatre's last two tenants were, briefly, Michael John LaChiusa's The Wild Party, and Smokey Joe's Cafe, which ran there for five years.

Best Man's director, Ethan McSweeny, staged Never the Sinner Off Broadway and Side Man at MN's Guthrie Theatre.

According to a spokesperson at the Jeffrey Richards press office, The Best Man, a limited engagement, begins previews Sept. 5 and run through Dec. 31. John Arnone (Tommy) is designing the sets, Howell Binkley Parade) the lighting. Rehearsals begin July 31.

The original production of The Best Man opened at the Morosco Theatre March 31, 1960. Cast-members included Melvyn Douglas (who won a Best Actor Tony for playing Russell), Lee Tracy, Frank Lovejoy and Leora Dana. Joseph Anthony directed the three-act drama, set at a 1960 Presidential Convention in Philadelphia.

 
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