post-gazette.com - 22/Dec/2011

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Best Play(s): 'House & Garden'
Thursday, December 22, 2011
By Christopher Rawson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

The world is so much with us, racing forward, that it's restorative to pause, recall the theatrical year past and savor its pleasures. You should try it yourself -- trying using the post-gazette.com search box at the top of this page. But the odds are you don't have as many memories to sort through as we do, and that makes it hard when faced with the annual directive to pick the top 10. There is too much range and variety in Pittsburgh's professional theater scene, both local and touring, plus the best of the semi-pro and university shows, to make it easy. Though it falls to me to wield the pen, PG theater criticism is a team effort. Of the 80-some local shows reviewed in 2011, I did the most, then Sharon Eberson, then Bob Hoover. Both spoke up for their favorites. Nine others reviewed at least one show, led by Kate Angell. I also queried a few trusted others whose help is enhanced by their anonymity. But the final decisions were necessarily mine. It was particularly tough selecting No. 1. It came down to "House & Garden" and "Maria de Buenos Aires," both excellent collaborations in unusual ways. The former won out because two plays staged simultaneously and (literally) on top of each other is simply the greater feat. We also struggled with the bottom of the top 10 -- "Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods" could easily have moved up. I further relieved pressure on the top group by creating a category for solo shows; otherwise, "The Amish Project" would be in the top 10, as well.

Teddy, portrayed by Martin Giles, blathers uncomprehendingly as his British wife, played by Helena Ruoti, left, and French fling, Nike Doukas, face off on this unlikely field of amatory battle in the "House" half of "House & Garden" at Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre.

1. Alan Ayckbourn, "House & Garden," Pittsburgh Irish & Classical Theatre: Two interlocking plays ("House" and "Garden") in adjacent theaters trace the comic haps and mishaps at an English country estate. Actors exited one play just in time to enter the other, keeping two audiences entertained with Mr. Ayckbourn's rueful comedy. Good as separate plays, the two multiply their effect when served in tandem.

2. Astor Piazzolla (music) and Horacio Ferrer (libretto), "Maria de Buenos Aires," Quantum Theatre: A tango opera, mixing a melancholy song cycle, surreal poetry and smoky music, then using ballet noir, operatic voices and a rich video accompaniment to create a story despairing, romantic and ultimately mythic. The space played its part, a cabaret wrapped around ramps and platforms in a derelict East Liberty Y, a dusty echo of the battered streets of turn-of-the-20th-century Buenos Aires.

3. Tarell Alvin McCraney, "Marcus, or the Secret of Sweet," City Theatre: A story about a Louisiana teenager coming to terms with his sexuality, told by a theater poet with original myth-making power. Part of Mr. McCraney's Brother/Sister trilogy, it draws on the oldest strands of Yoruba folklore and the newest hip-hop rhythms.

4. John Logan, "Red," Pittsburgh Public Theater: A play about art and the war between generations, as Mark Rothko, the artist as epic hero, looks back to the great masters, triumphs over his immediate predecessors and sneers at his pop art successors. There's also a surrogate son with whom to tussle, while man's tenuous place in the universe is in the balance.

5. Leslie Bricusse (book, lyrics) and Frank Wildhorn (music), "Jekyll & Hyde," Pittsburgh CLO: Director Robert Cuccioli (who played the lead on Broadway) returned to re-stage and re-jigger his previous CLO success with a largely new cast, especially strong in its women.

6. Oscar Wilde, "The Importance of Being Earnest," PICT: Director Alan Stanford added a frame story about the exiled author taking his desperate pleasure in a Parisian cafe and also taking refuge in a revival of his great play in his own mind, casting it from the cafe's rent boys and other habitues while saving the imperious Lady Bracknell for himself.

7. Madeleine George, "Precious Little," City: A crisp tough-minded but often comic play about a linguist working with an ape. It's also about language, memory, culture, commitment and, ultimately, the hopes and fears of love and maternity.

8. Gab Cody (with Rita Reis), "Fat Beckett," Quantum: An appropriation of "Waiting for Godot," re-imagined as a more hopeful journey by two female comics, performed by the authors and staged in another Quantum-found space, a derelict school building in Lawrenceville.

9. Tracy Letts, "Superior Donuts," Public: A feel-good comedy about the gritty slice of Chicago life seen in a doughnut shop, where greed and abuse are eventually turned back by loyalty and honor.

10. Peter Sinn Nachtrieb, "Hunter Gatherers," Bricolage: A grisly comedy that peels back social niceties and finds two young couples reduced to primal comic mayhem.

A runner-up dozen:

Tammy Ryan, "Lost Boy Found in Whole Foods" (Playhouse Rep); David Lindsay-Abaire (book, lyrics) and Jeanine Tesori (music), "Shrek" (PNC Broadway Across America); Yasmina Reza, "The God of Carnage" (Public); "Million Dollar Quartet" (PNC Broadway); Martin McDonagh, "Lonesome West" (Playhouse Rep); August Wilson, "King Hedley II" (Pittsburgh Playwrights Theatre); William Cameron, "Violet Sharp" (Terra Nova Theater); Euripides, "Electra" (Public); Jeffrey Hatcher and Eric Simonson, "Louder Faster" (City); Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, "Seussical" (Pittsburgh Musical Theater); Caryl Churchill, "Mad Forest" (Carnegie Mellon); and Tennessee Williams, "The Glass Menagerie" (Prime Stage).

Best solo show: Jessica Dickey was magnificent in her own "The Amish Project" (City). Keith Bunin's "Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir" (also City) is a cabaret that morphs into a drama, with the charming Luke Macfarlane as Sam. And of Alan Cumming's cabaret for the 25th annual Pittsburgh AIDS Task Force benefit (Public), I predicted, "it's going to take an awful lot of great theater to keep this evening off my annual list of the Top Ten theater evenings."

Best debut of a new company: Organic Theater Pittsburgh in Sarah Ruhl's "Dead Man's Cell Phone."

Special mention: The retrospective of Frank Gagliano's Voodoo Trilogy (Pittsburgh Playwrights).

Theater of the year: City Theatre, with five of its six mainstage shows among these bests.

Stay tuned for the annual Performer of the Year story, coming in early January, when we celebrate the year's best performers, directors, designers and others.

Senior theater critic Christopher Rawson: 412-216-1944.

First published on December 22, 2011 at 12:00 am

Post-gazette.com A&E / THEATER & DANCE - 17/Nov/2011

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Luke Macfarlane steps into role of volatile singer in City Theatre's 'Sam Bendrix'

Thursday, November 17, 2011
By Sharon Eberson, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Luke Macfarlane rehearses for his one-man world premiere,
"Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir," at City Theatre.

Imagine you are seated in a smoky cafe in 1950s New York, ready for a night of same-old, same-old as a young man and three-piece band perform a cabaret act of popular music. The city outside bustles to a cultural sea change that's exploding artistic norms.

If you've arrived at the scene, you have found your way to the other side of the time tunnel where performer Luke Macfarlane and writer Keith Bunin hope to lead audiences experiencing "Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir," a world premiere at City Theatre's intimate Lester Hamburg theater.

The one-man show includes music by Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein and the Gershwins within the structure of a cabaret act that turns out to be a confessional by Sam. He is saying goodbye to New York, where he had come from a small town, like so many others, and things hadn't turned out quite as he planned.

'Sam Bendrix at The Bon Soir'

Where: City Theatre, Lester Hamburg Studio Stage, 1300 Bingham St., South Side.
When: Through Dec. 18. 7 p.m. Tuesday and Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday and Friday, 5:30 and 9 p.m. Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday; 1 p.m. matinees Nov. 30 and Dec. 7; no performances Nov. 23-24.
Tickets: $35-$60 (check online for student and senior discounts); citytheatrecompany.org or 412-431-CITY.

Sitting in a Starbucks on the South Side on a spring-like day a couple of weeks ago, Mr. Macfarlane and Mr. Bunin discussed the collaboration that has brought this project to City. "Sam Bendrix" strives to generate the feeling of a time and place while incorporating some of the lesser-known songs by big-name composers of the era. And it's about what it meant to be gay in 1958, when the play is set.

"If you were from a small town in the middle of the country you might not know any other people like you, and it led to a sort of influx into the cities and it created this New York City life that really was unprecedented," Mr. Bunin said. "We were also interested in the ways things were very open and very coded, and the incredible things that were going on artistically. Like the Beat generation, the modernist painters ... Jackson Pollock, Frank O'Hara, 'West Side Story,' ... Jack Keroauc, Allen Ginsberg ..."

"It's so interesting to really look at this history and you say, 'Oh my God, these things were happening at the exact same time.' It's shocking," Mr. Macfarlane said.

You may recognize the name Luke Macfarlane and the chiseled good looks from his stint on the ABC series "Brothers & Sisters," in which he played Scotty, who was coupled with one of the brothers of the title. He made his Broadway debut last year in the acclaimed revival of "The Normal Heart," about the rise of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the early 1980s.

The native of London, Ontario, sings and plays the cello, too, which is in part how he wound up as Sam Bendrix. Mr. Bunin had worked on another project with Mr. Macfarlane, so he knew he could sing, even though the last time was with a high school band, before Mr. Macfarlane changed gears and decided to tackle drama at the Juilliard School in New York. (You can listen to tracks of his singing with that band, Fellow Nameless, at lukemacfarlane.org/fellow-nameless.)

"That was the fun thing about knowing the actor," Mr. Bunin said. "I think it's a real privilege. Normally when you write a play, you write a play not knowing who is going to be in it. The fun thing about this was it was a manageable situation. That was a great way to work, and a way you never get to work."

Although the weight of the play would seem to be squarely on the shoulders of the 31-year-old Mr. Macfarlane, he has solid help in music director Douglas Levine, who is the onstage accompanist and who has to react to Sam's increasingly dangerous dialogue.

"They are the other audience," Mr. Macfarlane said of the band. "Doug's fantastic. He's such a gifted pianist. We have yet to start working with the whole band [adding bass and drums], and when they come in, that's going to be great for Doug because I can hear him imagining the whole band and with his 65 fingers, he's playing the whole band. I think when he doesn't have to do that, he's going to take it to level 150."

Mr. Macfarlane has put his trust in Mr. Levine as he has trusted Mr. Bunin and director Mark Rucker, another partner in the "Sam Bendrix" project, to give him all he could handle -- but not too much.

"Keith is such a ferocious reader and knows so much about history before he starts a project. And in a way starting out with more and kind of cutting back was sort of a cheat for the actor. A lot of my background work was done for me, and sometimes in rehearsal I find myself saying another line from another draft. But it's in a great way, because the character is living these lines he may never get to say but they are still very real in my head."

He laughs when it's suggested that "Sam Bendrix" is for someone with masochistic tendencies, because there are so many things for an actor to play: Sam is a singer and a musician who has to bare his emotions and get increasingly drunk as the play progresses. Mr. Macfarlane pointed to a revealing line in the play in which Sam, speaking of someone else, says, "The only reason people get drunk is they have an excuse to say things they would never say."

"I think like most actors, it's really exciting to be challenged," the actor said. "You're constantly saying, 'Put me in coach.' That's what all actors want to do. And I knew when I looked at the script for the first time, I could do this. There are also times when you look at things and think, 'Oh my gosh, this isn't me.' So I feel it's like the privilege of the playwright knowing the actor. He didn't give me anything impossible. I don't pull a trombone out."

Both men are glad to introduce the play in the intimate setting of the Hamburg, standing in for the real Bon Soir, a lamented Greenwich Village club where famous comedians and singers like Barbra Streisand and Ethel Waters were known to perform. The character of Sam is the club's bartender who fills in at the mike on some nights.

Mr. Bunin noted that "it's really a play, so it doesn't work in a cabaret space," where people are being served and perhaps talking over the performer. "I found when researching this, you go to Joe's Pub or the West Bank [Cafe in New York], and people don't really listen there ... and this show requires the audience to listen to everything that's being said. So it wants to have a feeling, which I think Tony [Ferreri] and the designers are creating at the Hamburg, of it being in a cabaret space."

The playwright was familiar with City's stages from a short visit during a rehearsal of his play, "The Credeaux Canvas," in 2002. He and artistic director Tracy Brigden go way back to her stints at the Manhattan Theatre Club and Hartford Stage.

The play was workshopped at Vassar College with five performances for audiences before coming here. Both men are eager for more feedback from discerning audiences like the ones they expect at City Theatre. Mr. Macfarlane attended a performance of "Time Stands Still" there, and observed that the audience was "sophisticated and listened really well."

In their first few days in Pittsburgh, the friends and colleagues had visited The Andy Warhol Museum and Fallingwater, and Mr. MacFarlane, who has been living and acting in Los Angeles for most of the past decade, had called his sister to tell her he had awakened to snow for the first time in a long time.

Pittsburgh was making him feel nostalgic for a city of his youth, Hamilton, Ontario, "where the steel industry used to be," and at the same time revealing its artistic side.

"It wants to be in a city of culture," Mr. Macfarlane said of "Sam Bendrix." "Pittsburgh is really interesting in that way. There seems to be a real commitment to culture and there has been for the past hundred years, in a way that other cities don't have, and cities that are closer to epicenters."

Or as Mr. Bunin put it, "You feel like the city has its own identity and it's very secure in its identity. ... There's a sense of a cultural civic pride."

Sharon Eberson: seberson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1960.

Luke and Keith Bunin was on Pittsburgh TODAY

Clip: Kong Chang

Luke Macfarlane and Keith Bunin was on Pittsburgh TODAY on the 16th of November.
Original clip was posted on facebook

Playbill.com - 16/Nov/2011

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THE SCREENING ROOM: Luke Macfarlane Sings in Sam Bendrix at Pittsburgh's City Theatre (Video)
By Michael Gioia
16 Nov 2011

Luke Macfarlane, who was last seen on Broadway in the Tony Award-winning production of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart, is currently  starring in the title role in the world premiere of Keith Bunin's 1950s-set show tune-studded play Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir, which began in Pittsburg Nov. 12.

Mark Rucker directs Sam Bendrix, which officially opens Nov. 18 at City Theatre's Hamburg Studio Stage and continues through Dec. 18. The production features music by Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein and the Gershwin brothers.

According to City Theatre notes, "The drinks and the music flow at the legendary Bon Soir. In 1958 Greenwich Village, a young singer and his band take the stage for a final performance before he quits New York City forever. While a chair he's holding for a special someone sits empty all night, Sam Bendrix tells a classic tale of an era not yet ready for the revolutionary changes on the horizon."

Macfarlane is also known for playing Scotty Wendell on ABC's "Brothers & Sisters. His credits also include FX's "Over There" and the feature film "Kinsey."

The City Theatre is located at 1300 Bingham Street in Pittsburgh, PA. For more information, visit CityTheatreCompany.org.

For a preview of Macfarlane in Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir, look below:

POP City - 09/Nov/2011

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Pop Filter Hot Pick: City Theatre presents world premiere of Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir
Jennifer Baron | Wednesday, November 09, 2011

City Theatre is bringing a world premiere production to its intimate Southside-based Lester Hamburg Studio Stage. The latest play to mark its 37th season, Keith Bunin's Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir, will transport audiences to a highly creative and influential moment in American history.

The year is 1958, the setting the legendary Bon Soir club in New York's lively Greenwich Village. At the bustling cabaret-style club, charismatic musician Sam Bendrix and his talented band are about to take the stage for what will be their final riveting performance. Underscoring the cultural, political and societal shifts brewing beneath the surface of modern America, the new play weaves a "tale of an era not yet ready for the revolutionary changes on the horizon."

As the drinks and the music flow around Bendrix, he's about to make the dramatic decision to quit the New York City life forever. Audiences will be mesmerized by some of the era's most enduring songs--as a lone chair the young singer reserves "for a special someone" sits empty in the club all night.

Move over Tom Cruise--there's another Hollywood star in town! Starring in the title role is accomplished actor and singer Luke Macfarlane, best known for his portrayal of Scotty Wendell in ABC’s hit series Brothers & Sisters. Macfarlance recently appeared in the 2011 Broadway production of The Normal Heart, and has also starred in FX’s Over There, Robert Altman's Tanner on Tanner (Sundance Channel), and in the feature film, Kinsey. The Canadian actor and musician, who was born in London, Ontario in 1980, studied drama at New York City's prestigious Juilliard School, and has starred in several award-wining Broadway and Off-Broadway productions.

“Luke’s magnetic star power on the very intimate Hamburg stage is going to make for an unforgettable evening of theatre," says City Theatre's artistic director Tracy Brigden.

"I am fascinated by this particular period in history in New York. So much was going on comedically and in the art world, with jazz, the Beats and painters at The Museum of Modern Art; West Side Story was on Broadway and Chet Baker was playing. It's a very interesting time," says playwright Keith Bunin, who previously worked with Macfarlane, and first met Brigden 15 years ago in New York. "In the play, Sam is about 30 years old, and is from the generation that served in World War II, a time that redistributed so many people into big cities, where they discovered new worlds."

Based in Brooklyn, the 40-year-old playwright has been in town rehearsing since Oct. 17. He started working on Sam Bendrix in 2009, and workshopped the play in Los Angeles and at Vassar College. "We are really creating a real City Theatre production of this show. It's been a great experience for the star, the director and myself to work with all of the Pittsburgh people, including the design team, local musicians and musical director Douglas Levine."

Directed by Mark Rucker, the show's design team includes Tony Ferrieri (scenic), Angela M. Vesco (costume), Andrew David Ostrowski (lighting), and Brad Peterson (sound).

Both the audience, and the songs themselves, play a central role in the drama. "I want the audience to feel like they are in the time period, not superior to it, or nostalgic for it. What's really fun is that the audience is both themselves, and cast in the role of an audience that would be watching the show in 1958," says Bunin, who is quick to point out that this does not translate to audience participation (so no need to exercise those vocal chords or dance steps!).

"It's really a play disguised as a cabaret act. What's tricky about this show is that you don't want to do it in an actual cabaret space, where the audience is not really paying the same type of attention and the expectations are different. Part of the fun has been developing the songs with the musical director, the actor and the director. These songs are so tensile, in terms of meaning and arrangements; the lyrics and music are so strong. The art and lyricism of mid-century American music is really incredible."

To cull the right music, Bunin listened to hundreds of songs during a research process that was greatly aided by the convenience of YouTube and iTunes. Songs range from both popular and lesser known numbers composed from the 1930s through the 1950s, with a focus on pieces that were actually performed in clubs in 1958.

Bunin returns to the City Theatre, where his play The Credeaux Canvas was produced in 2002. His plays, The Busy World is Hushed and The World Over, both premiered off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons. Next up for Bunin is the screenplay for a live action animation version of the life and work of Dr. Seuss, a project spearheaded by Johnny Depp's production house, Infinitum Nihil, and Universal Studio's Illumination Entertainment. Bunin is also developing a screenplay for the film adaption of a book by Stephen King's son, Joe Hill.

City Theatre’s Backstage Blog - 19/Oct/2011

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SAM BENDRIX brings a song to our art
Published October 19, 2011

After a weekend of previews and a (well-deserved) day off, the Time Stands Still company was back in rehearsal yesterday afternoon on the Mainstage, continuing to refine the production for evening preview performances headed towards Friday’s opening. But yesterday we also welcomed Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir—the first music rehearsal for that show, next up in the season, was underway in the rehearsal hall as Time Stands Still was rehearsing onstage. Music director Doug Levine and actor/singer Luke MacFarlane (best known for his role on ABC’s Brothers and Sisters, recently in the cast of the acclaimed New York revival of The Normal Heart) are clearly relishing the standards of the American songbook, as well as some lesser known but no less wonderful pieces, that playwright Keith Bunin has assembled into the “cabaret” performance of the character Sam Bendrix. Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir will play in the Hamburg Studio, which we’ll be transforming into the legendary nightclub of the title.

Luke MacFarlane will be playing Sam in SAM BENDRIX AT
THE BON SOIR by Keith Bunin.

I intended to stay for just a few minutes at the beginning of the rehearsal yesterday but I ended up sitting and listening for a couple of hours. I noticed that playwright Keith Bunin was smiling along with me as we enjoyed the easy rapport that was quickly established between Luke and Doug, who will be playing Sam’s band leader, and the clear promise of a charismatic performance as Sam by Luke–who is a great singer. You can hear that for yourself by listening here to a couple of the tracks he recorded with his band “Fellow Nameless”  – I especially like “Ahead of Me,” “Bone Dry,” “Take You Home,” and “The Wild.” (By the way, you can find a link to purchase Luke’s album while you’re there.) Of course, Sam Bendrix at the Bon Soir is much different stylistically — it takes place in 1958 and Sam, backed by a three-piece ensemble, performs songs that were written more or less around the mid-20^th century: classics from the American songbook by such musical giants as Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II, to name a few.

Buy your tickets to Sam Bendrix while you’re here to see Time Stands Still. Or before that at 412-431 (CITY) or online–before it sells out!

Advocate.com - 20/Apr/2011

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Larry Kramer: Please Know 

By Brandon Voss

The Broadway cast of The Normal Heart 

The Normal Heart, Larry Kramer’s seminal 1985 play about the dawn of the AIDS crisis, is finally beating on Broadway. Directed by Joel Grey and George C. Wolfe, the production, which officially opens April 27, stars celebrated Broadway actor-director Joe Mantello as activist Ned Weeks, leading a starry cast that includes Ellen Barkin, John Benjamin Hickey, Lee Pace, Jim Parsons, and Luke Macfarlane. Following the first preview performance on April 19, volunteers positioned outside the intimate John Golden Theatre handed out copies of a typed letter from the 75-year-old playwright. Here is that letter in its entirety:

The Broadway cast of The Normal Heart 

A letter from Larry Kramer

PLEASE KNOW

Thank you for coming to see our play.

Please know that everything in The Normal Heart happened. These were and are real people who lived and spoke and died, and are presented here as best I could. Several more have died since, including Bruce, whose name was Paul Popham, and Tommy, whose name was Rodger McFarlane and who became my best friend, and Emma, whose name was Dr. Linda Laubenstein. She died after a return bout of polio and another trip to an iron lung. Rodger, after building three gay/AIDS agencies from the ground up, committed suicide in despair. On his deathbed at Memorial, Paul called me (we’d not spoken since our last fight in this play) and told me to never stop fighting.

Four members of the original cast died as well, including my dear sweet friend Brad Davis, the original Ned, whom I knew from practically the moment he got off the bus from Florida, a shy kid intent on becoming a fine actor, which he did.

Please know that AIDS is a worldwide plague.

Please know that no country in the world, including this one, especially this one, has ever called it a plague, or dealt with it as a plague.

Please know that there is no cure.

Please know that after all this time the amount of money being spent to find a cure is still miniscule, still almost invisible, still impossible to locate in any national health budget, and still totally uncoordinated.

Please know that here in America case numbers continue to rise in every category. In much of the rest of the world — Russia, India, Southeast Asia, Africa — the numbers of the infected and the dying are so grotesquely high they are rarely acknowledged.

Please know that all efforts at prevention and educations continue their unending record of abject failure.

Please know that there is no one in charge of this plague. This is a war for which there is no general and for which there has never been a general. How can you win a war with no one in charge?

Please know that beginning with Ronald Reagan (who would not say the word “AIDS” publicly for seven years), every single president has said nothing and done nothing, or in the case of the current president, says the right things and then doesn’t do them.

Please know that most medications for HIV/AIDS are inhumanly expensive and that government funding for the poor to obtain them is dwindling and often unavailable.

Please know that pharmaceutical companies are among the most evil and greedy nightmares ever loosed on humankind. What “research” they embark upon is calculated only toward finding newer drugs to keep us, just barely, from dying, but not to make us better or, god forbid, cured.

Please know that an awful lot of people have needlessly died and will continue to needlessly die because of any and all of the above.

Please know that the world has suffered at the very least some 75 million infections and 35 million deaths. When the action of the play that you have just seen begins, there were 41.

I have never seen such wrongs as this plague, in all its guises, represents, and continues to say about us all.

Larry Kramer

For more information, visit TheNormalHeartBroadway.com 

Advocate.com - 20/Sep/2010

[Source]

Stars Line Up for McNally Play

By Advocate.com Editors

A one-night-only staged reading of Some Men, Terrence McNally's 2007 off-Broadway hit chronicling gay men over the past 80 years, has attracted an all-star cast. Alan Cumming, John Glover, Jason Ritter, Steven Weber, and Luke MacFarlane are among the actors confirmed for the reading. The play will be performed at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills on October 4. Proceeds from the production will benefit the Courage Campaign Institute.

McNally is a Tony Award-winning playwright whose credits include The Ritz, The Rink, Corpus Christi, Master Class, and Love! Valour! Compassion!