Glenn Close to Star in Night Music on Broadway

Glenn Close is coming back to the Great White Way. The three-time Tony winner will star in A Little Night Music in 2006. Trevor Nunn, who worked with the actress on the Broadway mounting of Sunset Boulevard and A Streetcar Named Desire in London, will direct the musical, according to Variety.

Close has been nominated for five Academy Awards for The World According to Garp, The Big Chill, The Natural, Fatal Attraction and Dangerous Liaisons, won an Emmy Award for Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story and received three Tony Awards for The Real Thing, Death and the Maiden and Sunset Boulevard. Her last stage credit was playing Blanche in Nunn's National Theatre production of Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire in the fall of 2002. She can currently be seen on the big screen in The Stepford Wives.

Suggested by the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of a Summer Night and featuring music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by Hugh Wheeler, A Little Night Music is a tale of lost loves, secret yearnings and scandalous affairs. Desirée, a famous actress, rekindles an affair with her former lover, now married to a dizzy wife half his age. Meanwhile, Desirée's jealous current lover has an acerbic wife of his own to contend with. Rounding out this cast of characters are a divinity student in love with his own stepmother, a retired mistress to the rich and famous, an on-the-make housemaid and an illegitimate daughter who asks too many questions.

The show originally ran on Broadway for 601 regular performances from February 1973 to August 1974 and won six Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

This revival of A Little Night Music will be presented by the Frankel/Viertel/Baruch/Routh Group, which also has on its agenda a musical version of Leap of Faith music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Glenn Slater and a book by Janus Cercone, who wrote the screenplay to the film and a new tour of Hair.