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Carmen Cusack set to star in ‘Call Me Madam’ at New York City Center

Tony nominee Carmen Cusack (“Bright Star”) has won the plum role of Ambassador Sally Adams (originally played by Ethel Merman in 1950) in the upcoming Encores! production of Irving Berlin’s feel-good musical comedy “Call Me Madam,” which will run Feb. 6-10 at New York City Center. The cast will also include Ben Davis (“La Bohème”), Carol Kane (“Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”), Brad Oscar (“The Producers”) and Lauren Worsham (“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder”). City Center previously presented “Call Me Madam” as part of the Encores! series in 1995, with Tyne Daly playing Sally Adams.

New cast members to take over ‘The Ferryman’

A new cast will take over “The Ferryman,” Jez Butterworth’s epic and explosive drama about an extended Irish family that suddenly faces danger from the Irish Republican Army, beginning Feb. 19. According to a production source, the current British-Irish company members (who previously appeared in the London production) are only permitted by Actors’ Equity Association to work on Broadway for a limited time. The new cast will include Brian d’Arcy James (“Shrek The Musical”), Holley Fain (“Grey’s Anatomy”), Emily Bergl (“Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”), Fred Applegate (“The Last Ship”), Jack DiFalco (“Torch Song”), and Shuler Hensley (“Oklahoma!”). Blair Brown (“Orange Is the New Black”) will also join the cast on April 16.

Pianist Hershey Felder to conclude ‘Great Composers Series’

Pianist, writer and actor Hershey Felder will bring his “Great Composers Series” (in which he has played George Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin and other iconic composers in biographical one-man shows) to a finish with “Hershey Felder, a Paris Love Story,” in which Felder will tell his own story while featuring the music of Claude Debussy. It will premiere in April in Silicon Valley, in between ongoing regional productions of Felder’s other shows. In recent years, Felder has performed his shows in New York at Off-Broadway’s 59E59, including “Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin” last summer. 

Civic theater company to re-enact deportation proceedings

Waterwell, a civic-minded theater company, will re-enact real-life deportation proceedings (based on court transcripts) at Fordham University School of Law and the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse later this month. The piece, which is being presented free of charge, is titled “The Courtroom.” “We have sought out these site-specific venues so that the audience can experience what it is like to enter one of the courtrooms, where enormous questions about who gets to be a U.S. citizen are playing out at the granular level every single day,” Waterwell artistic director Lee Sunday Evans said in a statement. For more info visit waterwell.org.

Spotted…

Chaz Bono at “The Cher Show”…Leonardo DiCaprio at “Network”…Susan Sarandon at “To Kill a Mockingbird”…Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton at “Choir Boy”…Judd Apatow at “The Ferryman”…Jim Gaffigan at “Blue Ridge.”