Cullum to Star in and Forsman to Direct The New Group Production of Sin: A Cardinal Deposed

Two-time Tony Award winner John Cullum will star as Cardinal Bernard Law in The New Group’s upcoming production of Michael Murphy’s Sin: A Cardinal Deposed under the direction of Carl Forsman, artistic director of the Keen Company. The production is scheduled to open in October at a Theatre Row venue yet to be announced.

Cullum won his Tonys as Best Actor in a Musical for Shenandoah and On the Twentieth Century. His other Broadway credits include Camelot, On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, the Roundabout Theatre Company’s All My Sons, and Urinetown, for which he also earned a Tony Award nomination. From August 26 to September 11, Cullum will be appearing at the Clarence Brown Theater in Knoxville, Tennessee (his hometown) in a production of Ronald Harwood’s The Dresser opposite his son, actor JD Cullum.

Forsman earned a Drama Desk Award nomination for The Voice of the Turtle. Earlier this summer, he garnered excellent reviews for the Keen Company program of two one-acts plays by Thornton Wilder, Pullman Car Hiawatha and The Happy Journey to Trenton and Camden. His next assignment is the Atlantic Theater’s production of two Eugene Ionesco one-acts, The Bald Soprano and The Letter, set to begin performances on September 1.

In her June 11, 2004 review of a Boston-area production of Sin: A Cardinal Deposed for TheaterMania, Caroline Burlingham Ellis wrote, “This dramatization of the actual deposition that Bernard Cardinal Law gave in connection with lawsuits involving pedophile priests is theater inextricably interwoven with reality.” Ellis went on to describe the piece as “a powerful crystallization of the evil that was perpetuated on children by a few degenerate priests and by the skewed priorities of the Boston Archdiocese hierarchy.”