Zach Spicer

Zachary Spicer, a former Putnam County resident, who appeared at PCPH in productions such as Fiddler on the Roof and The Glass Menagerie, will make his Broadway debut in January in the play WIT.

As reported by Andrew Gans at Playbill.com:

Casting is now complete for the Manhattan Theatre Club's production of Margaret Edson's Wit, which will make its Broadway debut starring Tony winner Cynthia Nixon Jan. 5, 2012, at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre.

Directed by Lynne Meadow, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play will officially open Jan. 26; tickets are currently on sale through March 11.

Joining Tony and Emmy Award winner Nixon as Vivian Bearing will be Pun Bandhu (Technician), Olivier Award winner Suzanne Bertish (E.M. Ashford), Michael Countryman (Harvey Kelekian/Mr. Bearing), Jessica Dickey (Technician), Chiké Johnson (Technician), Greg Keller (Jason Posner), Carra Patterson (Susie Monahan) and Zachary Spicer (Technician).

Wit, according to MTC, "follows a brilliant and exacting poetry professor (Tony and Emmy Award winner Cynthia Nixon) as she undergoes experimental treatment for cancer. A scholar who devoted her life to academia, she must now face the irony and injustice of becoming the subject of research." The play had its New York premiere in 1998 receiving universal acclaim and ran Off-Broadway for over 500 performances. It was the most honored play of the season garnering the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and was named Best Play by the New York Drama Critic Circle, the Drama Desk Awards, the Outer Critics Circle Awards, the Drama League, and the Lucille Lortel Awards.

The creative team for the Broadway production includes Santo Loquasto (scenic design), Jennifer von Mayrhauser (costume design), Peter Kaczorowski (lighting design) and Jill BC Du Boff (sound design).

Tickets, priced $57-$116, are available by calling (212) 239-6200, online by visiting www.Telecharge.com or by visiting the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre Box Office (261 West 47th Street).

For more information visit www.ManhattanTheatreClub.com.

Congratulations to Zachary!!!


Zachary Spicer who appeared in productions of Fiddler on the Roof and most recently as young Tom in Director Larry Sutton’s production of The Glass Menagerie, is studying acting in New York City at the Circle in the Square. He also appears in professional productions, including The Irish Play which was recently written about in this copyrighted story from The New York Times as follows:

Two Guys Drunk on Ireland, and the Party’s Just Begun

By RACHEL SALTZ Published: June 27, 2007

“The general atmosphere reeks of talk,” a character in “The Irish Play” says, speaking of the Dublin apartment shared by a would-be playwright and a would-be terrorist who rant and argue about race memory, blood, poetry, ambition, middle-class platitudes and what it means to be Irish.

Jonathan P. Judge-Russo, left, Alicia M. Fitzgerald and Zachary Spicer.

It is 1975. Liam, the not-quite terrorist, is the kind of angry, word-churning Irishman who inflames the imagination of the playwright, Cian, a Yank from Boston. Drunk on the soulful Irishness of Yeats, O’Casey and Joyce, Cian soaks up Liam’s banter and outbursts, typing them straight into his own “Irish Play.”

Liam is drunk on Irishness, too, but his is the self-lacerating kind, handed down by what he calls “the Irish Free State Ministry of Pain, Suffering and Catholicism.” Together the two try on and discard attitudes and personas while the 20-something insults fly: “Poser!” “Hypocrite!”

This is the promising set-up of Tim McGillicuddy’s “Irish Play,” a production of the Hamm & Clov Stage Company that has been showing to enthusiastic audiences at the Irish Arts Center. But as the plot swings into action — Cian’s girlfriend is pregnant, and he wants to take her away to London; Liam, an orphan, finds out that he’s not Irish by blood, compromising his plans to go to Belfast to foment revolution with his girlfriend — the play becomes more conventional, its characters’ choices and motives less organic.

Directed by Theodore Mann, “The Irish Play” is billed as a romantic comedy. It is. The sparks, though, come not from the two couples but from the friendship between the roommates, and if it’s a triangle of desire, the third point is Ireland.

Zachary Spicer’s Cian is an impassioned if callow idealist. The excellent Jonathan P. Judge-Russo makes Liam his perfect foil: a charmer and a lout, and the play’s charismatic driving force.

The girlfriends (Alicia M. Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Stephensen) are not as vividly imagined, and the two couples seem notional. As a result, the about-faces and life-changing decisions Cian and Liam make in the second act don’t ring true.

This is comedy, so Mr. McGillicuddy, a first-time playwright, provides a happy ending. But it’s hard to imagine the Cian and Liam of Act I being happy with how their creator has arranged their fates in Act II.