Julia Louis-Dreyfus walked onto a Broadway stage for the first time in her four-decade career Saturday night, opening in a starry revival of Jon Robin Baitz's "Other Desert Cities" at the Hudson Theatre alongside Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Joe Keery and Lily Rabe.
The limited engagement, which began previews September 29 and marks the play's first Broadway revival since its original 2011 run, is directed by Tony winner John Benjamin Hickey. It is scheduled to play through January 17, 2027, according to the production's ticketing page.
Louis-Dreyfus, best known for "Seinfeld" and "Veep," plays Polly Wyeth, a former screenwriter and committed Reagan Republican whose daughter, a journalist played by Rabe, returns home to Palm Springs for Christmas and announces she is publishing a memoir that will expose a buried family tragedy. Harris plays Polly's husband, a retired actor turned diplomat; Janney plays Polly's recovering-alcoholic sister; and Keery, making his own Broadway debut after years on "Stranger Things," plays the couple's younger son, a reality-television producer.
A Pulitzer finalist returns
Baitz's play premiered off-Broadway at Lincoln Center Theater in late 2011 before transferring to the Booth Theatre, where it earned five Tony nominations, including best play, and was a finalist for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Judith Light won a Tony for featured actress in that original production. The new staging is designed by Scott Pask, with costumes by Tom Broecker, lighting by Natasha Katz and sound and original music by Mikaal Sulaiman — the same design team behind several of Hickey's and Pask's past Broadway collaborations.
Casting news for the revival first broke in May, and Playbill reported at the time that tickets would go on sale in late May and early June, months ahead of the eventual opening. In that run-up, Baitz said he trusted Hickey "completely" to find whatever life remained in a play he wrote more than fifteen years ago, while Hickey described the piece as "an incredibly funny, surprising, and heartbreaking play about an American family."
The production's producing team includes ATG Productions, Bad Robot Live, Gavin Kalin Productions, Kristin Caskey, and Bee Carrozzini and Mike Isaacson, with Samuel Dallas of Envoy Theatricals serving as general manager.
A debut years in the making
For Louis-Dreyfus, 65, the opening closes a long gap in an otherwise exhaustive résumé: eleven Primetime Emmy Awards, a Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, and leading roles across five decades of television, but no previous Broadway credit. Broadway.com's opening-night coverage noted the unusual density of star power converging on a single stage for a modestly scaled, dialogue-driven family drama rather than a musical or a splashier commercial vehicle.
Formal reviews from the major New York critics were still arriving Sunday into Monday morning, as is typical in the hours after an opening-night curtain, and a clear critical consensus on the production had not yet emerged by Monday morning. What was not in dispute is the commercial pull of the cast: the show's limited run had been tracking as one of the fall season's hottest tickets since casting was announced, well before previews began.
The production now settles into its regular eight-show-a-week schedule at the Hudson Theatre, competing for audiences against a crowded fall Broadway slate that this month also includes Billy Crystal's solo show "860," opening Wednesday at the Imperial Theatre, and Aaron Sorkin's revival of "A Few Good Men," set to open October 29 at the Vivian Beaumont with Bradley Whitford and Tom Blyth. "Other Desert Cities" is booked through mid-January, giving Louis-Dreyfus and her castmates roughly three months to find their footing in front of paying audiences — and for the trade press to render its verdict.
