A Few Good Men Opens October 29 at the Vivian Beaumont
Lincoln Center Theater's revival of Aaron Sorkin's courtroom drama stars Tom Blyth and Bradley Whitford. Previews sold out the Beaumont. The limited run ends January 10, 2027.
A Few Good Men officially opens tonight, October 29, at Lincoln Center Theater's Vivian Beaumont Theater. It is the play's first Broadway revival.
Aaron Sorkin wrote the courtroom drama. Michael Arden directs. The production began previews October 8 and is scheduled to run through January 10, 2027.
Tom Blyth, in his Broadway debut, plays Lt. Daniel Kaffee, the Navy lawyer assigned to defend two Marines accused of murder. Bradley Whitford plays Col. Nathan R. Jessep, the Guantánamo commander at the center of the case. Krysta Rodriguez plays Lt. Cmdr. JoAnne Galloway.
The company also includes Stephanie Berry as Judge Randolph, Nick Blaemire as Lt. Sam Weinberg, Michael Oberholtzer as Capt. Jack Ross, Collin Kelly-Sordelet as Pfc. Louden Downey, Lavel Schley as Lance Cpl. Harold W. Dawson, Thom Sesma as Capt. Matthew Markinson, Daniel Velez as Pfc. William Santiago and John Zdrojeski as Lt. Jonathan Kendrick. Casting is by Bernard Telsey and Karyn Casl of The Telsey Office.
The road here
Sorkin based the play on a case his sister Deborah, then a Navy JAG lawyer, was handling in Guantánamo Bay, involving Marines who had nearly killed a fellow Marine in a hazing ordered by a superior. Sorkin, then bartending at the Palace Theatre, drafted the story on cocktail napkins.
The play opened on Broadway on November 15, 1989, at the Music Box Theatre, directed by Don Scardino, with Tom Hulce as Kaffee, Megan Gallagher as Galloway and Stephen Lang as Jessep. It ran 497 performances.
Sorkin adapted his own play for the 1992 film, directed by Rob Reiner and starring Tom Cruise as Kaffee, Demi Moore as Galloway and Jack Nicholson as Jessep. The film received four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture.
Whitford's casting closes a loop in the production's history. He was in the original 1989 Broadway company, playing Lt. Jack Ross, the role Oberholtzer plays in this revival. Whitford later played Josh Lyman across seven seasons of Sorkin's The West Wing.
For the revival, Sorkin has revised the script. Reporting on the production describes the new draft as a substantial update, 37 years after the premiere.
The box office before the reviews
The opening arrives with the Beaumont already full. In the week ending October 25, the last full week of previews, A Few Good Men grossed $1,371,447 at 100% of capacity, with 8,824 in attendance and an average ticket of $155.42, according to the Broadway League. It was one of six productions to sell out that week.
That gross is the highest weekly figure in the play's Broadway history, counting the original 1989-90 run.
The run is capped at January 10, 2027. What the reviews do to the remaining ten weeks of ticket demand will show up first in next week's League report.