Olivier Award-winning actress Jenna Russell will take the lead in the Nottingham Playhouse and Leeds Playhouse co-production of Pam Gems’s Piaf in May 2020.
Russell was in the 2006 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George at Wyndham's Theatre and won the Olivier for best actress in a musical.
Adam Penford, artistic director of Nottingham Playhouse who will direct Piaf, said, “Nottingham Playhouse produced Piaf in the 1980s and I’m thrilled to be bringing this lively play back to the theatre.
“It takes a real star to capture the legend that is Edith Piaf and Jenna Russell is one of the UK theatre’s most beguiling actor-singers. She has a unique talent for bringing fragility, spirit and charisma to every role she tackles. Nottingham’s in for a magical night at the theatre.”
Piaf will run at the Playhouse from Friday 8 until Saturday 23 May 2020.
The Playhouse has also announced that in 2020 there will be a new production of Ron Hutchinson’s farcical comedy Moonlight and Magnolias. When the producer of Gone with the Wind scrapped the script three weeks into filming, he asked another director and screenwriter to create a new one. They had only five days to achieve cinematic magic and the play speculates what happened behind locked doors.
Moonlight and Magnolias will run from Friday 21 February until Saturday 7 March.
The theatre has commissioned Nathaniel Price to write First Touch, a play that will tackle the footballing world’s child sex abuse scandal. It features Clayton James, a 17-year-old Nottingham lad who seems to have the world at his feet after being offered a professional contract at a First Division club. During an era of racism, hooliganism and Thatcher’s administration, he is forced to confront a past he had tried to bury.
First Touch will make its debut from Friday 5 until Saturday 20 June.
The summer will mark the world première of a new musical designed for London’s West End which calls for identical twins.
Identical will be co-produced by Nottingham Playhouse and Kenny Wax Ltd. It is based on the novel The Parent Trap by Erich Kastner, which inspired Disney films featuring Hayley Mills in 1961 and Lindsay Lohan in 1998 and features music and lyrics by George Stiles and Anthony Drewe.
Wax said, “it’s a wildly ambitious project which will stand or fall on whether we can cast identical twins who the audience can’t tell apart. Without that there’ll be no show. So our challenge over the next nine months is to scour the country and leave no stone unturned until we find our Lottie and Lisa.”
Auditions for identical twins will take place in London on Saturday 5 October and in Nottingham on Saturday 26 October. Identical will run in Nottingham from Friday 31 July until Saturday 22 August 2020.
William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice will be brought up to date in the first co-production between Nottingham Playhouse and the city’s Lakeside Arts. The play, directed by Martin Berry, will be transported to modern-day Goose Fair in Nottingham, one of Europe's largest travelling fairs with a history that dates back more than 700 years.
The Merchant of Venice can be seen in the Playhouse’s Neville Studio from 7 until 9 April.
In the same month, the Playhouse will welcome Bryony Lavery’s new adaptation of Oliver Twist as part of the Ramps on the Moon consortium. The play, based on Charles Dickens’s novel, will be brought to life with sign language, audio description and captioning, placing D/deaf and disabled artists and audiences at the heart of the project.
First produced by the Playhouse in 2018, Louis Sachar’s Holes which tells the story of Stanley Yelnats, who is cursed with bad luck and sent to a labour camp for a crime he didn’t commit, returns to Nottingham from 5 until 8 February as part of a UK tour.
The full programme is available at the Nottingham Playhouse web site.