Theater-loving patrons rejoice! Whether or not they were able to get tickets to witness the National Theatre’s 2018 Tony Award®‒winning Broadway revival of ANGELS IN AMERICA, audiobook listeners everywhere can soon experience the unforgettable performances in a new way. Playwright Tony Kushner’s Pulitzer Prize‒winning Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes will be available as an audiobook for the first time, narrated by the full cast of the National Theatre’s 2018 Tony Award®‒winning Broadway revival.
Listeners can experience Andrew Garfield’s and Nathan Lane’s award-winning performances as Prior Walter and Roy Cohn. They are joined by the full Broadway cast, as well as Bobby Cannavale and Edie Falco, who provide additional narration exclusively for the audiobook.
The full cast includes:
Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter
Nathan Lane as Roy M. Cohn
Susan Brown as Hannah Pitt
Denise Gough as Harper Pitt
Beth Malone as The Angel
James McArdle as Louis Ironson
Lee Pace as Joseph Pitt
Nathan Stewart-Jarrett as Belize
with narration by
Bobby Cannavale (Millennium Approaches) and Edie Falco (Perestroika)
The audiobook recording is based on the National Theatre’s hit production, directed by Marianne Elliott (called “flat-out fabulous” by The New York Times critic Ben Brantley) and features the original musical score by sound designer Adrian Sutton.
In a statement, Kushner said:
“I’ve always been a lucky playwright (kinehora kinehora pooh pooh pooh), never more so than when Marianne Elliot and her cast of monumentally brilliant and brave actors brought Angels In America to London’s National Theatre and then to Broadway. Theater vanishes once the last performance ends, so I count it another stroke of great good fortune that Penguin Random House Audio has transformed this splendid stage production into an experience that’s dramatic and also, in the audiobook’s theater of human voices, novelistic in its intimacy. Listening to it has been for me a rediscovery of the plays.”
“Our production team is constantly pushing the boundaries of the audiobook format, from the 166-person recording of George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo, to the full-cast party that is Mike D and Ad-Rock’s Beastie Boys Book,” says Penguin Random House Audio President and Publisher Amanda D’Acierno. “Angels in America is another immersive experience listeners will remember for years to come.”
Since its premiere in 1991, Angels in America—both Part One: Millennium Approaches and Part Two: Perestroika—has become one of the most important works of American theater. Its portrait of New Yorkers grappling with the AIDS crisis and complex questions of identity, community, justice, and redemption remains as relevant today as ever, especially as 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.
Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes will be available on CD and as a digital download from Random House Audio on May 14, 2019, wherever audiobooks are sold. Click here for more information.
About the Playwright
photo credit: Angela Brown
Tony Kushner’s plays include Angels in America; Hydriotaphia, or the Death of Dr. Browne; The Illusion, adapted from the play by Pierre Corneille; Slavs!; A Bright Room Called Day; Homebody/Kabul; Caroline, or Change, a musical with composer Jeanine Tesori; and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the screenplays for Mike Nichols’s film of Angels in America and for Steven Spielberg’s Munich and Lincoln. He is the author of three books and is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two Tony Awards®, three Obie Awards®, two Evening Standard Theatre Awards, an Olivier Award, an Emmy Award®, two Oscar® nominations, and the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he was awarded a National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. He lives in Manhattan with his husband, Mark Harris.
