On Golden Pond With Jones & Uggams Set for March Bow at Cort

As previously reported, Ernest Thompson's On Golden Pond, starring James Earl Jones and Leslie Uggams, will be hitting Broadway this season. The classic play is set to begin performances at the Cort Theatre on March 22 in preparation for an April 7 opening.

This production of On Golden Pond, directed by Leonard Foglia, premiered at the Kennedy Center earlier this fall and then hit the DuPont Theatre in Wilmington, Delaware for a brief run from October 22 through October 31. In the play, retired New England professor Norman Thayer Jones and his spirited wife Ethel Uggams decide to spend one final summer at their family's lakeside cottage in Maine. En route to a European honeymoon, the couple's estranged daughter Chelsea Linda Powell arrives to leave behind her fiancé Peter Francis James and his troubled young son Alexander Mitchell. Colliding generations soon forge common ground, but when Chelsea returns to discover Norman playing the father she never had, years of bitter memories and resentment rise to the surface.

Variety's Paul Harris wrote of the production: "With his famous voice often at full pitch, Jones offers an especially commanding presence as the gruff and forgetful codger who lumbers around the lakeside cottage seeking opportunities to complain. But his impish and caring sides are meticulously and delightfully revealed by the arrival of a young fishing companion. Uggams is a more-than-capable match as the family's stern but loving matriarch. She makes it seem as if we are eavesdropping on a 40-year-plus relationship, while watching this remarkably together woman cope so stoically with her husband's decline. Leonard Foglia's sensitive direction allows the play's many key moments to sparkle and the action to flow smoothly around Ray Klausen's rustic cabin set."

The Cort Theatre is currently occupied by Mario Cantone's Laugh Whore, which is scheduled to end its limited engagement there on January 2.