Ivo van Hove’s award-winning London production of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge” will cross the pond this fall less than five years after the last revival closed on Broadway.The unusually quick return of the contemporary classic comes courtesy of top Broadway producer Scott Rudin and Lincoln Center Theater, and will coincide with two anniversaries: the 60th anniversary of the Broadway premiere of the drama and the centenary of the birth in 1915 of the creator, one of the greatest of American playwrights. While “Death of A Salesman” and “The Crucible” are widely considered Miller’s masterworks, “A View from the Bridge” is among his most produced works.Indeed this will be the fourth Broadway revival since the play bowed in September of 1955 with its tragic tale of Eddie Carbone, an Italian-American longshoreman, and his unnaturally close relationship with his niece, Catherine. Carbone’s ferocious jealousy is unleashed when she is drawn to Rodolpho, a handsome young relative newly-arrived in Brooklyn from the old country.In the 2010 mounting, Scarlett Johansson, in her Broadway debut, won a Tony Award for playing Catherine opposite Liev Schreiber as Eddie. The production, directed by Gregory Mosher, was nominated for five more Tonys, including Best Revival. This new production, which began at the Young Vic before transferring to the West End, comes with the imprimatur of rave reviews from the London critics and several Olivier Awards, including for its star Mark Strong and van Hove, the experimental Belgian-born director based in the Netherlands. Likening the play to classic Greek tragedy, Lyn Gardner wrote in The Guardian, “From the opening moments in which Mark Strong’s sinewy, apparently indestructible Eddie is glimpsed showering after a shift on the waterfront pier, to the final seconds when it rains blood, this is a production that releases the play from its naturalistic trappings — and in doing so distills it and makes it seem timeless and universal…There is an Eddie Carbone lurking in all of us.”Van Hove, one of the theater’s most inventive and controversial directors, has had several productions off-Broadway and at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But “A View from the Bridge” will mark his Broadway debut. Rounding out the English cast will be Phoebe Fox as Catherine, and Nicola Walker as Beatrice, Eddie’s long-suffering wife. Previews will begin on October 21, prior to an official opening date of November 12. The limited engagement at the Lyceum Theatre runs through February 21.
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