Mike Birbiglia is Heading to Broadway
Mike Birbiglia’s run Off-Broadway has been so strong that he’s taking the show, simply named “The New One” to Broadway next month. He’ll have a limited run of shows- but not that limited- at the 1100 seat Cort Theater.
Previews at the Cort will begin on October 25th and open on November 11th, running through January 20th.
“I’m so excited to be bringing The New One to The Cort Theater on Broadway which is where I saw the great Kenneth Lonergan play This Is Our Youth,” Birbiglia said at the start of a very long statement (read it all below). “Which is fitting because this show is about somebody’s youth. Not mine.”
Birbiglia wrote the autobiographical one-man show, with additional writing from his wife, Jennifer Hope Stein. It’s enjoyed a long and mostly sold-out run at the Cherry Lane Theater.
In a statement, he said, “I’m so excited to be bringing The New One to The Cort Theater on Broadway which is where I saw the great Kenneth Lonergan play This Is Our Youth. Which is fitting because this show is about somebody’s youth. Not mine. But somebody’s! I won’t tell you any more than that. The truth is I try not to tell people anything about my new show because, I find, the less you know about the show the more you will enjoy it. My goal is to make as many people laugh as possible and ideally several hundred will cry. My producer Kevin McCollum and the Shubert Organization are letting me do that in a space that will accommodate the right amount of people. Which is about 1,100. I’m pretty sure there are union regulations about entertaining more than 1,100 people at once. So we will limit it to 1,100 people laughing and 300 people crying.
A lot of people thank their spouses when they make something but with this show I really do have to thank my wife, Jennifer Hope Stein, because she wrote a lot of the best lines. She’s a writer on the show and that was important to me because I wanted to convey the truth about what we experienced together- which I will tell you nothing more about. But man is it gonna make you laugh. And cry. (Please abide by the union crying vs. laughing regulations.) And I’m thrilled to share this journey with my wife Jen, my director Seth Barrish and designers Beowulf Boritt, Aaron Copp and Leon Rothenberg, as well as my longtime collaborators Ira Glass and Joe Birbiglia. We’re bringing this squad to a new party. Hopefully there’s pizza.”
Birbiglia was awarded Comedian of the Year the Montreal’s prestigious Just for Laughs festival this year. His last two shows, “My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend” and “Thank God for Jokes” went to Netflix after their theater run, and his bestselling book became a movie he directed and starred in, “Sleepwalk With Me.”
