Lincoln Center Theater
 
 
Show Details
Who's Who
Media
 

Media

Dinner at Eight Production Photos
View
 

Photos by Joan Marcus

The director Gerald Gutierrez made his long-awaited return to the Vivian Beaumont Theater with a revival of George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber's 1932 comedy, DINNER AT EIGHT. No one did these large-scale, 'old school' plays better than Gerry Gutierrez, who won back-to-back Tony Awards for his earlier LCT productions of A Delicate Balance and The Heiress. DINNER AT EIGHT was an elegant, glittering affair with a stage stuffed to the rafters with lavish scenery and twenty-four of the best actors working in New York today.

The play is an entertaining ship of fools with a lot of selfish, greedy people aboard. It peers into the lives of a group of New Yorkers during the Great Depression. As a social-climbing Park Avenue hostess hurriedly organizes a dinner party in honor of visiting English nobility, the play goes skipping around the city to reveal the background of each of the invited guests and the business intrigues and clandestine romantic entanglements that link them all together. By the time dinner is served, the audience is in on everyone's dirty little secrets!

When George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber began their 24-year professional partnership with the play Minick in 1924, they were at the height of their individual and flourishing careers. Ferber had won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big and was in the midst of writing Show Boat. Kaufman's tremendous output as playwright included co-authoring Merton of the Movies and Beggar on Horseback (both with Marc Connelly), and the hugely successful The Cocoanuts, starring the Marx Brothers. Kaufman and Ferber--who both began their careers as journalists--went on to create some of the finest plays of the early 20th century, including the perennial favorites The Royal Family (1927), Dinner At Eight (1932) and Stage Door (1936).

GEORGE S. KAUFMAN (1889-1961) wrote dozens of popular Broadway shows. Because almost all of them were written with co-authors, Kaufman became known as 'The Great Collaborator.' His many hits include Once In A Lifetime, You Can't Take It With You, The Man Who Came To Dinner (all written with Moss Hart) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Of Thee I Sing (written with Morrie Ryskind, and George and Ira Gershwin).

EDNA FERBER (1887-1968) was a best-selling novelist whose books include the Pulitzer Prize winner So Big, Show Boat (on which the landmark musical is based), Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron and Giant, which sold over five million copies and was adapted into the now-classic film starring James Dean, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor).

Cast

  • Joanne Camp , Rhys Coiro , Kevin Conway , John Dossett , Christine Ebersole , Julian Gamble , Enid Graham , Joe Grifasi , Byron Jennings , Simon Jutras , Karl Kenzler , Mark La Mura , Anne Lange , Philip LeStrange , Mark Lotito , Charlotte Maier , Peter Maloney , Deborah Mayo , Ann McDonough , James Rebhorn , Brian Reddy , Marian Seldes , Sloane Shelton , Emily Skinner , Samantha Soule , David Wohl
  • Dorothy Loudon

  • By

    George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber

  • Directed by

    Gerald Gutierrez