Jason Alexander's Busy Theater Schedule Starts With 'The Cottage'
Jason Alexander’s latest theater project, the new comedy “The Cottage,” opened on Broadway last night — and it’s just the first of a string of theater projects that stand poised to keep the former “Seinfeld” star busy in the theater for the next year or more.
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
Alexander revealed what he’s got coming up on the latest episode of “Stagecraft,” Variety‘s theater podcast. In addition to starring in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of “Judgment Day,” the new comedy written by Rob Ulin and directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, in the spring, Alexander said he’s also talking with director Lonny Price about a 2024 production of “Fiddler on the Roof” in Los Angeles, with Price directing and Alexander starring as Tevye.
The project would be a reunion for Price and Alexander, who both starred in the original cast of “Merrily We Roll Along.” No firm plans have been set for “Fiddler,” but Alexander said he and Price already have an idea about how they’d approach it: “There’s been a lot of monkeying with ‘Fiddler’ in the last few revivals,” Alexander said. “What if we give it back its veritas and its originally intended values, and look at it again the way it more or less was intended to be?”
As a director, Alexander is also attached to “The War of the Roses,” the stage adaptation by Peter Tolan (“Rescue Me”) of the novel that also inspired the 1989 film with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas. Alexander noted that Eric McCormack, the “Will and Grace” star who plays a lead role in “The Cottage,” has also been involved in “War of the Roses” during its development.
“It is one of the funniest, finest, most theatrical plays,” Alexander said of Tolan’s dark comedy. It’s also expensive: “We have to build an absolutely stunning house and then destroy it [at every performace]. It has a cataclysmic ending.”
That project is aiming for Broadway — it had even been announced way back in early 2020 — but no theater or dates have yet been booked.
Alexander also mentioned a production of “The Last Five Years,” which he directed at Syracuse Stage in 2019, that he’d love to get to New York, as well as a couple of play revivals “that could be really fun,” he said, should they materialize.
Also on the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Alexander discussed the choreography of comedy, the secrets of upper-crust English emphasis, the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes and why he can never go too long without returning to the theater.
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
Source: Variety
