When the angels arrive in America, star of stage and screen Lee Pace will be among them. The forthcoming revival of the National Theatre’s production of Tony Kushner’s Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes will feature Pace as the Mormon “Joe Pitt,” a man struggling with his homosexuality and how it conflicts with his religion. Pace is well-known to theatre, television, and film audiences. He was last seen on Broadway in the revival of Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart. He starred in the Off-Broadway production Small Tragedy, which garnered him an Outstanding Actor Lucille Lortel Award nomination, as well as in the two-character play Guardians for which he was also nominated for a Lucille Lortel Award. On television, he starred in the critically-acclaimed Pushing Daisies (Emmy and Golden Globe nominations). Pace has just recently wrapped the fourth and final season of AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire. Among his many film appearances are Soldier’s Girl, The Good Shepherd, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, A Single Man, and Lincoln. More recently he has been seen in Guardians of the Galaxy as the intergalactic villain Ronan the Accuser, and in Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit trilogy as the Elf King Thranduil.

Part One of Angels in America, Millennium Approaches, and of Part Two, Perestroika, had its world premiere earlier this year in a sold-out run at the National Theatre starring Nathan Lane and Andrew Garfield who will be transferring with the production when it crosses the Atlantic and lands at Broadway’s Neil Simon Theatre. Angels in America will be a strictly limited, 18-week engagement will begin previews on Friday, February 23, 2018, with an official opening on Sunday, March 25. The production will also feature fellow original National Theatre cast members Susan Brown, Denise Gough, Amanda Lawrence, James McArdle, and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett. Marianne Elliott, a Tony-winner for War Horse, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) will once-again direct.

“A quarter-century after stunning the theater world, one of the greatest theatrical journeys of our time returns to Broadway in an acclaimed new production from the National Theatre.  As politically incendiary as any play in the American canon, Angels in America also manages to be, at turns, hilariously irreverent and heartbreakingly humane.  It is also astonishingly relevant, speaking every bit as urgently to our anxious times as it did when it first premiered.  Tackling Reaganism, McCarthyism, immigration, religion, climate change, and AIDS against the backdrop of New York City in the mid-1980’s, no contemporary drama has succeeded so indisputably with so ambitious a scope.”

Mark Robinson is the author of the two-volume encyclopedia The World of Musicals and maintains a theater and entertainment blog at markrobinsonwrites.com.