Anika Noni Rose Sets Theater Return With Musical Production Of ‘Carmen Jones’Posted by Wilson Morales
April 10, 2018
Source: Deadline
Deadline is reporting that Tony Award winner Anika Noni Rose is coming back to the theater stage with the off-Broadway musical production of Carmen Jones.
Last seen opposite A Raisin in the Sun (co-starring Denzel Washington)
Terrence Howard, James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, this will be Rose’s first appearance in a musical since winning a Tony Award for 2004’s Broadway production of Tony Kushner’s Caroline, or Change.
The site states that although she participated in a 2011 New York Philharmonic concert of Stephen Sondheim’s Company with Neil Patrick Harris, Carmen Jones, with book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II and music by Georges Bizet, will be her first musical theater production since Caroline, or Change.
Set in the South as World War II rages overseas, Carmen Jones tells the story of a tempestuous parachute factory worker who ignites her own battle in a tragic love triangle with an airman and a prizefighter. Adapted from Bizet’s legendary opera Carmen, Hammerstein shifted the story from Spain to World War II America, featuring an all African-American cast. The original production premiered on Broadway in 1943, and a 1954 film version, directed by Otto Preminger, starred Dorothy Dandridge (whose Oscar nomination for the role was the first for an African-American actress) and Harry Belafonte.
Directing for the Classic Stage Company will be CSC’s artistic director John Doyle, with choreography by Bill T. Jones. Beginning a limited engagement June 8, the production marks the first major New York revival of the the 1943 musical.
The Carmen Jones production will also feature David Aron Damane, Erica Dorfler, Andrea Jones-Sojola, Justin Keyes, Lindsay Roberts, Soara-Joye Ross, Lawrence E. Street and Tramell Tillman. The role of Joe will be cast shortly.
The limited engagement runs through July 29, and will be the finale of CSC’s 50th anniversary season.
For those who haven’t seen Rose on the stage, she is best known for co-starring in the film Dreamgirls, voicing African-American princess Tiana in Walt Disney Pictures’ 2009 animated film The Princess and the Frog, playing Kizzy in the History Channel remake of Roots and appearing on Broadway in the non-musical play Cat On A Hot Tin Roof with Terrence Howard, James Earl Jones and Phylicia Rashad. More recently she starred in the BET series The Quad, which was just cancelled by the network after two seasons.
