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    "headline": "First photos of Julia Louis-Dreyfus on Broadway as Other Desert Cities opens Sunday in New York",
    "description": "The Jon Robin Baitz revival at the Hudson Theatre also stars Allison Janney, Ed Harris, Lily Rabe and Joe Keery, and runs only until January 17, 2027.",
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    "keywords": "Allison Janney, Broadway, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Other Desert Cities, Theater",
    "articleBody": "The first production photos of Julia Louis-Dreyfus on a Broadway stage were released on Friday, October 16, two days before Other Desert Cities holds its official opening night at the Hudson Theatre in New York on Sunday, October 18. Taken by photographer Emilio Madrid, they show Louis-Dreyfus as the matriarch Polly Wyeth beside Allison Janney, Ed Harris, Lily Rabe and Joe Keery in the first Broadway revival of Jon Robin Baitz’s family drama. For an actor with 11 Emmy Awards, earned across Seinfeld, The New Adventures of Old Christine and Veep, this is a first: she had never appeared on Broadway before this production. Keery, whose screen career has been built on Netflix’s Stranger Things, is also making his Broadway debut. Baitz admitted, in a statement when the revival was announced on May 26, that he had nearly given up on seeing the play in New York again. His reason for trying: “What’s slightly unnerving is that nearly 20 years later, through all the fractures and divisions, the questions remain the same: how to live with who we are and what we’ve done and call that a life.” Who plays whom Harris, nominated four times for an Oscar for films such as Pollock, The Hours and Apollo 13, plays Lyman Wyeth, a former movie star who moved into Republican politics. Janney is Silda Grauman, Polly’s sister and one-time writing partner, the part that won Judith Light a Tony Award in 2012. Janney comes in with an Oscar for I, Tonya, seven Emmys and two previous Tony nominations of her own. Rabe, Tony-nominated for her Portia in The Merchant of Venice, plays Brooke, the daughter whose memoir threatens to expose what the family has buried. Keery is her younger brother Trip, who produces a courtroom-style reality show. The director is John Benjamin Hickey, a Tony-winning actor who acted in two Baitz plays early in his career. He and Janney played a married couple in the 2017 Broadway revival of Six Degrees of Separation. Returning to this script, Hickey said, he “was stunned at how relevant the play remains, maybe now more than ever.” From a 2010 reading to a 2026 revival The play has had an unusually quick climb and a long wait since. Baitz originally called it Love and Mercy; the final title borrows a freeway sign on eastbound Interstate 10 in California’s Coachella Valley that sends drivers toward Indio and “Other Desert Cities”. August 2010: a staged reading at the Ojai Playwrights Conference in California. January 13, 2011: the Off-Broadway premiere at Lincoln Center Theater’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, directed by Joe Mantello, with Stockard Channing, Stacy Keach, Linda Lavin, Elizabeth Marvel and Thomas Sadoski. It closed on February 27. November 3, 2011: the move to the Booth Theatre, the first Baitz play ever staged on Broadway, with Judith Light and Rachel Griffiths joining the company. 2012: five Tony nominations, including Best Play, with a win for Light; the play was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Booth run closed on June 17, 2012. September 29, 2026: previews begin at the Hudson, ahead of the October 18 opening. The action unfolds over Christmas Eve 2004 in Palm Springs, where Brooke comes home after six years in New York carrying a manuscript about her late brother, Henry. The production recommends it for ages 12 and up because the story deals with political violence and suicide. The run, by the numbers This is a limited engagement, and the window is fixed. Previews started on a Tuesday, September 29, and the final performance is set for Sunday, January 17, 2027, a span of 111 days, or 16 playing weeks. At the standard schedule of eight shows a week, Tuesday through Sunday with two performances on Wednesdays and Saturdays, that allows at most 16 x 8 = 128 performances, previews included. Each one runs 2 hours 15 minutes, with a single 15-minute intermission. The building has its own long history. Constructed in 1902 and 1903, the Hudson Theatre is one of the oldest surviving Broadway houses; it spent years as a CBS radio studio and an NBC television studio and only came back into Broadway use in 2017. ATG Productions and Bad Robot Live are among the producers, with sets by Scott Pask, costumes by Tom Broecker, lighting by Natasha Katz, and sound and original music by Mikaal Sulaiman, who won a 2026 Tony for his sound design on Death of a Salesman. A screen version was announced back in 2011, when producers Walter Parkes and Laurie MacDonald bought the film rights to Other Desert Cities, with Baitz attached to write. Nothing has come of it since, so the stage is still the only place to see the Wyeths, and the Hudson’s curtain comes down for the last time on January 17, 2027. Further reading Wikipedia: Other Desert Cities Wikipedia: Hudson Theatre Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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