Cate Blanchett to make Broadway debut in Chekhov play

Australian Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett is set to make her Broadway debut in The Present, a new adaptation of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov’s untitled first play.

The Broadway show will be a reprisal of The Sydney Theatre Company’s 2015 production, an adaptation of the Chekhov play known under various names such as Platonov, Wild Honey, Fatherlessness and The Disinherited, written by Blanchett’s husband, Andrew Upton. The play was only discovered in 1920, 16 years after Chekhov’s death.

Upton’s adaptation is set in Russia in the mid-1990s, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and centres on schoolteacher Mikhail Platonov (Richard Roxburgh) as he struggles with affections of four women while attending the birthday party of wealthy widow Anna Petrovna (Blanchett).

The opening date for the show has yet to be announced.

Source: Independent and Hollywood Reporter