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Welcome to Last Week on Broadway for Monday, January 12, 2026. I'm Broadway Radio's Matt Tamminini. On this podcast, we bring you all of the news from the past week on Broadway and look forward to everything that is going to be happening over the next seven days. We're going to start over at the St. James Theater where we got the second round of casting for the upcoming Broadway premiere of Titanique the Musical. We already knew that one of the show's creators and Off Broadway stars, Marla Mandel, would be reprising her role as Dion. Now we know that one of the show's other creators, Constantine Rossulli, will be returning to his role of Jack that he originated Off Broadway. But we also have a number of other announcements of people joining the Broadway cast, including original cast member Frankie Grande, who is returning to the role. This is one of the best jokes I've seen in a long time of Victor Garber. He is playing Victor Garber because of course, Victor Garber played the role of the ship's army architect in the film Titanic. But nobody knows his name and everybody in musical theater loves and knows Victor Garber. So Frankie Grande is playing Victor Garber. Also joining the cast will be star of stage and screen Deborah Cox as the unsinkable Molly Brown. But then the biggest star in this announcement of cast members is stage and screen icon Jim Parsons. When we talked about this on last week's episode, I gave you some hints about some casting rumors that I had heard and one of them was was the fact that Jim Parsons I gave you a bazinga reference that Jim Parsons would be joining the production and hysterically, Jim will be playing the role of Rose's mother, Ruth. I think this is very interesting casting. When this was originally announced to be coming to Broadway, especially at the St. James Theater, which is a fairly large house, I figured the only way that would really have a shot is if it brought in stars to round out this cast. Now Jim Parsons, big star. However, his most recent show on Broadway, Our Town, even Though it had a ton of other stars in it did not do incredibly well at the box office. So there will likely need to be other stars to kind of bump this up. And last week you remember I hinted at a couple other stars that have really been going around the rumor mill for this one. I would imagine we would hear those announcements coming up in the next week or so. One of them though I thought was going to be in the role of Jack, but that is obviously not going to happen because Konstantin Rasooli is going to take that on. So as I dug down a little bit more deeply into this conversation, it sounds like if the Mr. Shu fits, the actor in question is going to be taking on the role of Cal, which honestly makes a lot more sense. And I'm kind of sorry that I didn't think of that at first and just assumed that he would be playing Jack, but glad Constantine is back in the show. It would have felt weird if Marla was doing Selene and Constantine wasn't doing Jack. But if the actor I just hinted at is going to be playing Ca now, the rumor to go along with that is that there is a certain Oscar and Tony nominee who has done a slew of movie musicals is going to be making her long awaited Broadway return nearly 27 years after the last time she appeared on Broadway. So we want to see if that happens. But this show is starting to flesh out its cast and I'm hoping for the best for Titanic. Like it's a show that I really enjoyed off Broadway every time I saw it in two different locations off Broadway, but I am a little concerned that it's a little too small for the St. James and it ran so long off Broadway that it won't have the same pool for New York audiences. Where you know, I think a lot of people are hoping that the comparison for Titanic will be oh Mary. But oh Mary only ran for a couple months off Broadway before making the transfer to the main stem. But we will wait and see. Obviously performances of Titanic don't begin until March 26th. The St. James Theater. It is currently scheduled to be a 16 week limited engagement through July 12th. If some of these big stars, Jim Parsons, the people I hinted at but did not name, we'll see if they can actually continue on longer than that, if they enjoy it longer than that, or if it is a really strictly limited run. But my assumption will be that if it blows up and does really really well and wins Tony's in as a box office bonanza, it will obviously continue to run as long as humanly possible. Speaking of shows running as long as humanly possible, the longest running musical in history, the Fantasticks, is looking to make its Broadway premiere. That's right, the Fantastics ran for 42 years off Broadway. Now it is looking to come to the Great White Way, but with a slightly different angle. Director and choreographer Christopher Gattelli is working with a number of producers, including Daryl Roth, the owner of the Daryl Roth theater where the Titanic played off Broadway. They are working on a reimagined version in which the central romantic young lovers, which originally was Matt and Louisa, will now be Matt and Lewis. So they're going to reinterpret the show's allegory of love, longing and reconciliation through a gay lens. According to the producers, also Matt and Louisa's fathers in the original version, who orchestrate this secret love affairs to bring their children together so that they could actually tear down the wall in between their gardens and make one large garden. Those characters will actually now be the kids mothers. The show will feature a revised book and lyrics by the original writers, Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt. This new adaptation was completed before Jones died in 2023 and has had a number of runs out of town starting in 2022 in Flint, Michigan and then other places like Provincetown and the Coachella Valley Repertory Theater in California. I personally love the Fantastics and would love to see it on Broadway. I'm, you know, always concerned about drastic rewrites of shows. I think it's one thing when you do like they did with Company and just kind of essentially take the same show and just reimagine the context and the perspective. I generally like that. I'm a little more suspect of overhauling rewrite, especially when the people doing those rewrites are the original writers who are now in their 80s and 90s respectively. So either way, I'm excited about it. Again, love the Fantastics. Saw the Off Broadway production, my very first ever trip to New York City and have loved it ever since. So excited to see what happens. Also, if you're unfamiliar with Fantastic, listen to the original cast album. Jerry Orbach Absolutely amazing. I had that on shuffle in my car while I was taking a road trip this weekend. So there is no specific timetable as to when this would happen, but they did say that more information, creative team, cast timeline will be announced in the coming months. So I would imagine they are going to try to aim for a 2026, 2027 bow on Broadway. All right, let's get into some show and casting news. It was announced over the weekend that the original stars of Operation Mincemeat have added one more week to on Broadway, but they will now depart in February. David Cumming, Claire Marie Hall, Natasha Hogsden, Jack Malone and Zoe Roberts will wrap up their runs in the show on February 22, but the show is not closing. But they have not announced anything about replacements coming up in, you know, just about five, six weeks. It'll be interesting to see if these are people who were like understudies and standbys in that original Broadway production, if they're going to bring over people who have done the show in the UK or if they're going to try to cast it with bigger named Broadway folks. But the fact that this show began performances last season, it is still running is a success in and of itself. It is currently on sale at the Golden Theatre through April 26th of this year. That's the fifth extension, so hopefully whoever they bring in can continue to keep that show running because it is really just a delightfully silly show. And there was a great article over the weekend in the New York Times from Taffy Brodesser Acker who is a reporter for the New York Times and she wrote an article for the New York Times Magazine and the headline is why on earth have I seen the same Broadway show 13 times in investigation. So she dives into kind of like the super fandom of shows and how she has become obsessed with Operation Mincemeat. So if you want to read that, we will have it in the show Notes Last week Grace Aki and I talked about the Broadway reviews for Bug Tracy Letts play that stars Carrie Coon Mir Smallwood from the Manhattan Theater Club at Samuel J. Friedman Theater. And I had ruminated a couple times about the potential for that show to extend on Broadway and it has. The show has added two extra weeks. It was originally going to close on February 8th. It is going to now play through Sunday, February 22nd. That is maybe they could squeeze another week in there if they really wanted to. But they do have the Ballisters beginning performances at the end of March so they need to have the time to load out bug and load in the balusters and do all the tech for that stuff. So if you are hoping for an even longer extension you may get a week. But it is looking more and more like that will be the end of that then moving off Broadway Last week we got some information about the cast for an upcoming world premiere off Broadway show called Spare Parts. The show is written by David J. Glass and is directed by Michael Hurwitz. It is going to have its world premiere at Theater row beginning on February 26th and is currently scheduled to play through April 10th. The cast will feature a two time Tony nominee and at least two time Broadway radio guest Rob McClure. It will also include Michael Ginnett and Matt Walker with additional cast members to be announced. The show is set against the backdrop of radical aging research funded by a billionaire's quest for eternal life. Spare Parts confronts the blurred lines between science, identity and morality. All right, let's take a look at this week's theatrical schedule. We're going to start on Tuesday downtown of the Public Theater where the elevator repair company's production of Ulysses will begin performances. And unlike a lot of other elevator repair productions, this is actually a fairly normal runtime of 2 hours and 45 minutes. Of course this is a production of James Joyce's show Ulysses, but it does feature kind of the elevator repair services take on things. The show will begin performances this Tuesday, July 13th. Also my sister's Birthday Happy Birthday. Happy Birthday Katie. And it is going to run through February 15th and then on Thursday, January 15th we will have opening night at the Minetta Lane Theater for the production of the Disappear written and directed by Erica Schmidt. This is an Audible production. It is a strictly limited six week run of a show that features Dylan Baker, Madeline Brewer, Kelvin Harrison Jr. Hamish Linkletter, Anna Meriden and Miriam Silverman. Power couple Benjamin Braxton and Mira Blair, played by Linkletter and Silverman, see their picture perfect life go gloriously off script. Taking their friends, flings and daughter along for the ride. This show peels back the curtain on fame, ambition, marriage and reinvention in a smoldering comedy about how keeping it together sometimes means letting it all go again. This is an Audible Theater production so at some point in the future you will be able to listen to a streaming version of this show on their service. Also happening on Thursday over at mcc, even though it is not an MCC production, is a new play by Joe White called Blackout Songs. It is Directed by Rory McGregor, it has a six week run at MCC and it is described as an achingly intimate portrait of two people in love, addicted and bound to each other after a chance encounter at an AA meeting, a decade long affair blazes through ecstasy, relapse and recovery, chasing the impossible hope that the same person who breaks you might also be the one that saves you. The show marks the American stage debut of Abby Lee, who was most recently seen in the Netflix Netflix show Black Rabbit and the new York stage debut of Owen Teague, who was seen in the Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes movie. And then finally, Saturday at the Greenwich House Theater will be the closing performance of the new musical Picnic at Hanging Rock. On Valentine's Day in 1900, a group of teenage schoolgirls go on a picnic to the ForBidding Hanging Rock 3 Vanish Without a Trace. This is based on a novel by Joan Lindsay and was then turned into a film by Peter Weird. The book and lyrics are written by Hilary Bell and music and arrangements are by Greta Gertler Gold. Alright, that's all that we have for you today. If you want to hear more Broadway radio, head over to patreon.com broadwayradio if you sign up at the Mezzanine Tier and above, you'll not only hear all of our episodes early, but also get our Patreon exclusives there. Alright, thanks so much for listening and I will talk to you later. This.