Hugh Jackman may have gotten most of the attention at yesterday's press introduction for the upcoming Broadway premiere of Jez Butterworth's The River, but American audiences might also recognize co-star Cush Jumbo's face from the Season Three "Children of Earth" series on the Doctor Who spinoff Torchwood.
In "Children of Earth" Jumbo played "Lois Habiba," a Home Office assistant who helps the fictional Torchwood Institute foil the government's plan to comply with a demand by extraterrestrials to turn over to them 10% of the world's children. "Children of Earth" also featured the newest "Doctor Who" Peter Capaldi (in a different role). Capaldi also directed Jumbo in the British sitcom Getting On, about a hospital's geriatric ward.
Cush Jumbo has played Josephine Baker in her one-woman show Josephine And I, and she received an Oliver Award nomination for playing Mark Antony in an all-female West End production of Julius Caesar last year.
The third cast member of The River, Laura Donnelly, will also be making her Broadway debut. She will be the only member of the Royal Court cast to reprise her role on Broadway.
The show will be Jackman's fourth Broadway appearance. Stepping away from the song-and-dance he's become known for on stage, the X-Men star will play Butterworth's nameless, solitary fisherman, known only as The Man, who gets ecstatic about sea trout as he plays host to a woman who seems to be a new girlfriend. The play, as Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, "leaves one unsure whether one is watching a ghost story, gothic thriller or parable."
After a successful 2012 Royal Court theatre production in London, The River will begin previews for its Broadway premiere October 31, officially open November 16, and run through January 25, 2015.
