The actress will play opposite Michael Hayden in the play about the dance-inspired romance between two blue-collar New Yorkers. Syncopation will begin previews at the Longacre Broadway theatre Oct 2.
Syncopation will mark Campbell's Broadway debut, although the Canadian-born actress was trained as a ballerina and appeared in the Toronto production of The Phantom of the Opera. Her other screen credits include "The Craft," "Wild Things," "Drowning Mona," "Panic" and "Lost Junction." Michael Hayden, a Tony nominee for his work in Judgment at Nuremberg, has also appeared on Broadway in Carousel, Cabaret, Enchanted April and, most recently, Henry IV.
John Tillinger, a frequent hand at small-cast plays (Say Goodnight, Gracie, Tea at Five), will direct. Vaud E. Massarsky produces.
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."
John O'Connell provides choreography, which is said to express a "physical vocabulary that serves as a metaphor for the emerging feminism, immigrant success and the fulfillment of the American dream of the era." Allan Knee wrote the book for the upcoming Broadway musical Little Women, which will star Sutton Foster. Little Women will play on Broadway in late 2004.
Designing Syncopation are John Lee Beatty (sets), Brian Macdevitt (lighting) and John Gromada (sound). 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.
