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*With “The Quad” officially cancelled at BET, Tony winner Anika Noni Rose will return to the New York stage this summer, leading an off-Broadway revival of the 1934 musical Carmen Jones.
The Classic Stage Company production will be directed by John Doyle and choreographed by Bill T. Jones, with performances starting June 8 in a limited engagement scheduled to run through July 29. It marks the show’s first major New York revival since its Broadway debut 75 years ago.
The book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II transports Georges Bizet’s opera Carmen from the gypsy setting of a tobacco factory in Southern Spain in 1820 to the African-American South during World War II. The title character is a parachute factory worker drawn into a deadly romantic triangle with an airman and a prizefighter.
The musical is best known for the 1954 film version directed by Otto Preminger, which starred Dorothy Dandridge and Harry Belafonte.
Appearing alongside Rose in the revival are David Aron Damane, Erica Dorfler, Andrea Jones-Sojola, Justin Keyes, Lindsay Roberts, Soara-Joye Ross, Lawrence E. Street and Tramell Tillman. The other leading role of Joe, the airman, is to be announced.
Rose last appeared on Broadway opposite Denzel Washington in the 2014 revival of A Raisin in the Sun. She won a Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical in 2004 for Caroline, or Change, and played Maggie opposite Terrence Howard’s Brick in the 2008 revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
Rose’s film and TV work includes Dreamgirls, Roots, The Quad, The Good Wife, Private Practice, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Assassination Nation, which premiered at Sundance earlier this year.
