Clifford Odets’ Waiting for Lefty officially opened at Classic Stage Company on Monday, November 2, and with it Steven Pasquale, an actor CSC audiences know from its own stage, became a director. Allison Stock photographed the night, from the curtain call to a guest list that took in Bobby Cannavale, Kate Walsh and Stephen Schwartz.
Pasquale has acted at CSC before, in its production of Assassins, and on Broadway in American Son. Odets’ 1935 play is the first thing he has directed, and he stages it as a union hall built inside the Lynn F. Angelson Theater, where a meeting of Depression-era New York cab drivers waits for a leader who has not turned up and argues over what to do next. Much of the evening is carried by music and movement. The original score and arrangements are by Yeller Tooth, the duo of Sahar Milani and Cameron Scoggins, who also play in the company, and the choreography is by Susan Misner, whose credits include Fosse/Verdon.
The company of ten is Tala Ashe, a Tony nominee for English, with Raffi Barsoumian, Austin Durant, Greg Hildreth, Adam Kantor, Doireann Mac Mahon, Zach McNally, Milani, Scoggins and Henry Stram. Sets are by Scott Adam Davis, costumes by Márion Talán de la Rosa, lighting by Mextly Couzin and sound by Palmer Hefferan, and Buzz Cohen is the production stage manager. Jill Rafson is CSC’s producing artistic director.
Stock’s pictures follow the cast from their bows on the bare wooden set, still in costume, to the blue carpet afterward, first on their own and then with Pasquale and Misner kneeling at the front. Rafson joined the company onstage once the curtain call was over. Among the guests she photographed were Bobby Cannavale, Kate Walsh, Stephen Schwartz, F. Murray Abraham, Mare Winningham and Anthony Edwards, Celia Keenan-Bolger, Phillipa Soo, Ira Glass, Will Brill and Christopher Fitzgerald.
The production reached its opening having already added a week to its run, which now ends on Sunday, November 29, at 136 East 13th Street. CSC released the first production photos while it was still in previews.
Tickets for Waiting for Lefty are on sale here.
