The Broadway future for the new Stephen Sondheim-John Weidman musical, Wise Guys, is firming up. Producers have announced an opening date for the highly anticipated show of April 27, though a theatre is yet to be announced.

Nathan Lane and Victor Garber will star in Wise Guys, which will work out it kinks in workshop production at the New York Theatre Workshop, Oct. 29 to Nov. 20. Sam Mendes (Cabaret) will direct. Tickets for the workshop production will only be available to New York Theatre Workshop members. No public tickets will be available.

Wise Guys, the vaudeville-style biography of the eccentric brothers, Wilson and Addison Mizner, has been in the works for several years. The Lane-Garber-Mendes combination first came to light in January 1999, as first reported by Playbill On-Line.

Wise Guys was commissioned by the Kennedy Center in D.C. and was originally scheduled to open in fall 1996. Since then, it has been repeatedly postponed, though at least two readings have been done in New York, one on March 27, 1997 featuring Victor Garber as Wilson, the other on Nov. 8, 1997 with Garber as Wilson and Lane as Addison.

In a Sept. 12 article written by Sondheim for the New York Times, Sondheim closed by saying, "I have three points I wish to make about Wise Guys:
It's not about the Mafia.
It's a musical comedy
It's here. At last."