A workshop of Grand Hotel is into its second week, with Norbert Leo Butz, Elizabeth Stanley, Beth Malone, Douglas Sills and Austin Scott among the company tagged by choreographer Jesse Robb on Instagram.
Robb marked the milestone on November 2 with a post captioned simply “Week 2”, showing a script cover with the title on it and tagging the people in the room. No producer has announced the workshop, and no venue, dates or plans for what comes next have been made public.
Beyond Butz, Stanley, Malone, Sills and Scott, the post names Michael Maliakel, Taylor Colleton, Wade McCollum, Kevin Csolak, Drew Redington, Marissa Rosen, Brandon Block and Tatiana Lofton. Also tagged are Benedict Braxton-Smith, Mike Dobson and the tango partnership of Miriam Larici and Leonardo Barrionuevo.
It is a company heavy with Tony nominations. Stanley was nominated for Jagged Little Pill, Malone for Fun Home and Sills for The Scarlet Pimpernel, while Butz, a two-time winner, joined Hadestown at the Walter Kerr Theatre as Hermes in September, his first Broadway role since 2019.
The title has a long history behind it. Vicki Baum’s 1929 novel, which follows a weekend of guests crossing paths in a Berlin hotel, became the 1932 film that won the Academy Award for best picture, and later a Broadway musical directed and choreographed by Tommy Tune, with a book by Luther Davis, songs by Robert Wright and George Forrest, and additional music and lyrics by Maury Yeston. That production opened in 1989, ran for more than 1,000 performances and won five Tony Awards. Whether the new workshop is working from that score has not been said.
