Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in New York next spring will present an Olivier Award-winning revival of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Paul Mescal in the role of Stanley Kowalski, made famous by Marlon Brando. The New York production will follow a fresh run at the West End in London.
Streetcar, one of Tennessee Williams’s Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, imagines a down-on-her-luck Southern woman’s disruptive visit to the New Orleans home of her sister and brother-in-law. It was first staged on Broadway in 1947, and this latest revival began at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2022 and then transferred to the West End in 2023. Not only did the production win an Olivier, but so did Mescal and Anjana Vasan for their portrayals of Stanley and Stella Kowalski. Vasan will join Mescal in Brooklyn, as will Patsy Ferran, reprising her London performance as Blanche DuBois.
Critic Matt Wolf, writing in The New York Times, called the London production “an electrifying ensemble production”.
Mescal, an Oscar nominee for Aftersun, is also known for the series Normal People and the film All of Us Strangers, but he is likely to become much better known this month because he is starring in Gladiator II. Streetcar is his American theatre debut.
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The production, directed by Rebecca Frecknall, will return to the West End from February 3rd to 22nd at the Noel Coward Theatre before transferring to BAM, where it is scheduled to run from February 28th to April 6th. The producers of the West End production, led by ATG Entertainment, a large British theatre company with a growing presence in New York, are credited as presenting partners at BAM.
The production is the high point of the next season at BAM, which, like many non-profit arts organisations, has been struggling to rebuild after a period of economic challenges and leadership change. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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