Harvey Weinstein is going back to Plan A for his leading man in this spring’s Broadway musical “Finding Neverland.” He announced on Monday that Matthew Morrison, best known from the Fox series “Glee,” will star as the playwright J.M. Barrie in the show about the creation of “Peter Pan.”
Mr. Morrison played Barrie in a lengthy developmental workshop of the show last spring, but was said to be unavailable for this summer’s run of the show at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass. The Tony Award nominee Jeremy Jordan (“Newsies”) took over the role, earning good reviews in Cambridge, where the show broke attendance records and received a variety of positive and mixed reviews.
Whether Mr. Jordan, Mr. Morrison, or someone else would star as Barrie in the $11 million Broadway production has been a guessing-game in theater circles for weeks now. But the odds were always in Mr. Morrison’s favor.
Mr. Weinstein, while impressed with Mr. Jordan’s performance, has long believed that Mr. Morrison has the right blend of stage talent, star power, sexiness and maturity (he is 36; Mr. Jordan is 29) for the Barrie character, according to two theater executives involved with “Finding Neverland” who spoke on condition of anonymity because Mr. Weinstein had not authorized them to share his personal views. What’s more, when he did the development workshop, he had the option to play Barrie on Broadway, according to Victoria Parker, executive producer of the musical. She said that Mr. Weinstein was in negotiations with Mr. Jordan for another theater project, which she declined to disclose, and also noted that Mr. Jordan was starring in the Weinstein Company’s musical film “The Last Five Years” that is coming out this winter.
Mr. Morrison played Lieutenant Cable in the 2008 Broadway revival of “South Pacific” and also starred in the 2005 musical “The Light in the Piazza,” for which he received a Tony nomination. In “Finding Neverland” Barrie is in a midcareer rut and a listless marriage when he becomes a father figure to four young boys and falls in love with their mother – relationships that inspire him to write “Peter Pan.”
Mr. Jordan and his representatives did not immediately reply to requests for comment. Last Wednesday Mr. Jordan tweeted cryptically:
The casting shake-up for “Finding Neverland” is not over. The Tony winner Michael McGrath, who received strong reviews this summer as Charles Frohman, Barrie’s producer, will not reprise his performance in New York; he is joining the Broadway revival of “On the Twentieth Century” this spring. The “Neverland” spokesman said he had no casting information for the role of Frohman. (Mr. McGrath was a last-minute replacement this summer for Roger Bart, who abruptly left the production; Douglas Sills played the role in the spring workshop.)
“Finding Neverland,” directed by the Tony winner Diane Paulus (“Pippin”), will begin performances March 15 at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater and will open on April 15 (a week later than originally announced). The show, which has undergone extensive changes since its world premiere production in England in 2012, has a book by James Graham and music and lyrics by Gary Barlow and Eliot Kennedy.
It is Mr. Weinstein’s first outing as lead producer of a Broadway show, after years of investing in theater productions amid his work as an Academy Award-winning film producer.