Mike Birbiglia is headed to Broadway, baby! After a successful sold-out run at the Cherry Lane Theatre this summer, Birbiglia’s one-man show The New One will return, this time on Broadway, at the Cort Theatre in November. Previews begin on October 25 before opening night on November 11, and the show will conclude its limited run on January 20, 2019. The show is directed by Seth Barrish, executive produced by Ira Glass, and includes additional writing by Birbiglia’s wife, the poet Jennifer Hope Stein. Here’s what Birbiglia had to say on the news:
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.
In addition to The New One, Birbiglia previously wrote and starred in one-man shows Sleepwalk With Me in 2008 (it was adapted for the big screen in 2012) and Thank God for Jokes in 2016.