Where the hell are the girls?"

That is what director Harold Prince said when he read Gold, the new musical by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, according to the April 24 New York Newsday.

Chicago's Goodman Theatre has booked Gold for its 2002-03 season. The show will bow June 13, 2003, and run through July 19. Prince is the director.

The play is about the eccentric, real-life brothers, Addison and Wilson Mizner. The Mizners were regarded as risk-taking gamblers who ended up as real estate developers in Florida. Settings in the musical have included Alaska, California, New York City and Boca Raton, FL, which the brothers helped found.

In a Off-Broadway workshop of Gold (then called Wise Guys) a few seasons back, the story was heavy in male characters. The only major female role was Mrs. Mizner, Addison and Wilson's mother. The script now has "one of the best leading lady characters I've seen in a long time, a huge and lusty presence in that great American mold," Prince told Newsday. The report did not say whether the role was a love interest for either of the brothers.

No casting has been announced for Gold.

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The announcement of the Goodman booking was the first happy news to be associated with the musical in some time. Late last year, a high-profile legal battle between composers Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman, and producer Scott Rudin, over the rights to the long in-coming musical Gold, succeeded temporarily in ejecting the show from the Goodman Theatre's hopper. Prior to that, the show languished after an unsuccessful workshop at New York Theatre Workshop.

—By Robert Simonson