Mazzie and Sills to Star in Actors’ Fund’s On the Twentieth Century
Douglas Sills (Photo © Michael Portantiere)
Marin Mazzie and Douglas Sills will star in The Actors’ Fund of America’s benefit concert presentation of On the Twentieth Century on Monday, September 26 at the New Amsterdam Theater.
Seth Rudetsky, who conceived and music-directed the four previous Actors’ Fund benefit concerts, will return as musical director for the evening. The show will be directed by Peter Flynn and will feature choregoraphy by Denis Jones. The cast will also include Brooks Ashmanskas as Owen O’Malley, The Producers‘ Brad Oscar as Oliver Webb, and Spamalot‘s Christopher Sieber as Bruce Granit. The production’s design team includes Paul Weimer (sets), Rob Bevenger (costumes), and Jeff Croiter (lighting).
On The Twentieth Century, with music by Cy Coleman and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, is an adaptation of the classic Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur comedy Twentieth Century. The original production of the musical opened on Broadway in 1978, starring John Cullum as producer Oscar Jaffe, Madeline Kahn as starlet Lily Garland, Imogene Coca as religious fanatic Letitia Primrose, and Kevin Kline as Garland’s lover, Bruce Granit. Cullum and Kline won Tony Awards for their work, as did Coleman, Comden and Green (for both Best Score and Best Book of a Musical).
Mazzie, who will play Lily Garland, has appeared on Broadway in Kiss Me Kate, Ragtime, and Passion, earning Tony Award nominations for all three performances. Her other stage credits include Into the Woods, The Trojan Women: A Love Story, and the City Center Encores! production of Out of This World. Sills, who will play Oscar Jaffe, starred on Broadway in The Scarlet Pimpernel, for which he earned a Tony nomination. He was also seen on Broadway in Little Shop of Horrors. Earlier this year, he played David O. Selznick in the Manhattan Theater Club production of Moonlight and Magnolias.
Tickets for the Actors’ Fund benefit concert range in price from $75 to $2,500; to order tickets or to obtain further information, phone 212-221-7300, ext. 133 or e-mail ccooke@actorsfund.org.
