THEATRE NEWS:
Prince of Broadway pulls out of T.O.;
Strat vet returns to Fest in 2012

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
24 JAN 2012

Turns out that a musical about what happened in New York is going to stay in New York — at least for the time being. Producers for the new production of Prince Of Broadway — a musical retrospective of the career of the legendary Hal Prince — announced Monday that Dancap's scheduled run of the show, at Toronto's Four Seasons Centre this summer, has now been cancelled. Prince of Broadway will instead open directly on Broadway in November.

In announcing the change in plans, producer Aubrey Dan, president of Dancap, said: "The scale of the show has grown so considerably that the costs of a pre-Broadway try-out no longer make financial sense."

As for Prince himself, who will be intimately involved in the show with co-director Susan Stroman, he's not writing Toronto off entirely. Prince was quoted in Monday's announcement, saying "Hopefully, Torontonians will visit us in New York and, if things turn out as well as we wish, we'll visit them subsequently."

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On other fronts, the Stratford Festival announced Monday that actor C. David Johnson, currently appearing on Broadway in Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, The Musical is poised to return to the Stratford stage this summer, cast in major roles in 42nd Street (opposite his one-time 'Street Legal' castmate, Cynthia Dale) and in Pirates of Penzance.