“It was always a hope for me to celebrate actors locally and bring actors from the wider international scene to Washington, to my home,” said artistic director Simon Godwin, who is directing Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varma in a production of “Macbeth” that arrives next month. “In that respect, it’s a season very much celebrating, I would say, actors and the actorly spirit. And how that relates to identity is another big underpinning, I think, of this season — how we shape-shift and how we try and figure out who the hell we are at any one moment.”
In the Godwin-directed “Comedy of Errors,” starting in September, the separated-at-birth Dromio twins will be played by Brightman and David Fynn — the actors who originated the lead “School of Rock” role of Dewey Finn in the Broadway and West End productions, respectively.
Tom Stoppard’s “Leopoldstadt,” the tale of a Jewish family in early-20th century Vienna that won last year’s Tony for best play, begins in November. The co-production, which will be staged at the Huntington Theatre in Boston before coming to D.C., was reimagined by Stoppard and director Carey Perloff to accommodate a smaller cast.
Kani, the South African actor who plays King T’Chaka in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, will star next winter in the Ruben Santiago-Hudson-directed “Kunene and the King,” a play Kani wrote about the bond between a terminally ill Shakespearean actor and his caregiver in post-apartheid South Africa. Bonneville will play the titular role in the Anton Chekhov classic “Uncle Vanya” next spring, with the main stage series rounded out in June 2025 by Emily Burns’s feminist reimagining of Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”
Patrick Page, the star of last year’s heralded “King Lear” production at the Shakespeare Theatre, will return in December for a limited engagement of his solo show “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain,” which is now running off-Broadway.
