Issue #126: March 15, 2004

• Broadway audiences will be treated to the premiere of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang next season when it lands at the Ford Center for the Performing Arts on April 28, 2005. The show continues to play to full houses at London's Palladium since it opened over two years ago. The musical is based on the 1968 movie musical, which starred Dick Van Dyke and Sally Ann Howes. Auditions for the stage version will get underway in the next few months.

• Some familiar Canadian talent can be seen currently in a couple of long-running productions. Soulful singer Deborah Cox has taken over the lead in the Elton John-Tim Rice version of Aida, which has been running for four years. Former National Ballet soloist Christopher Body is now doing his dance thing in the Billy Joel-Twyla Tharp Tony award-winning musical Movin' Out.

• He did such a good job last year the Tony Awards have asked him back. Aussie hunk Hugh Jackman is set to host the annual awards from Radio City Music Hall on June 6.

• Look for popular director Joe Mantello to lead the team to revive David Mamet's classic play Glengarry glen Ross. An early 2005 opening is tentatively penned in.

• The latest update on Donald Margulies' Sight Unseen has Ben Shenkman filling Liev Schreiber's shoes when the Manhattan Theater Club opens the production at the Biltmore on May 25. Shenkman is riding the success wave following his hot performance recently in HBO's Angels in America.

• The Kennedy Center will host a production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof June 12–July 4 at the Eisenhower Theater. Mary Stuart Masterson plays Maggie the Cat with Mark Lamos in the director's chair.

• Known as the original Phantom, Michael Crawford is joining Andrew Lloyd Webber's next musical The Woman in White, which opens at the Palace Theatre on September 15. The musical is adapted from the 1860 novel by Charlotte Jones.

• Look for the legendary duo Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh to join forces again after a very long hiatus, to launch a summer revival of Evita in 2005.

• Carl Anderson, best known as the film and Broadway Judas in the ground-breaking Tim Rice-Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Jesus Christ Superstar died recently after a seven-month battle with leukemia. Only 58, Anderson made his mark in the 1973 Norman Jewison film and is estimated to have played the role on Broadway and the touring production 1,200 times since 1971.