Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes CBE (born 1 August 1965) is an English film and stage director, producer and screenwriter. In theatre, he is known for his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1994), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003). He directed an original West End stage musical for the first time with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013).
For directing the play The Ferryman, Mendes was awarded the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2019.
EXCLUSIVE: Sam Mendes, the Oscar and Tony award-winning director, has chosen three London theater stars – Michael Balogun (National Theatre Live: Death of England-Delroy), Hadley Fraser (Donmar Theatre’s Coriolanus), and Nigel Lindsay (Chichester Festival Theatre’s Woman In Mind) to bring his much-garlanded production of The Lehman Trilogy back into the West End.
That’s following triumphant runs at the UK’s National Theatre, the Park Avenue Armory, and Broadway, and a phenomenal 16-week, sold-out run at London’s Piccadilly Theatre in 2019.
The actors will portray the Bavarian-born Lehman brothers, Emanuel, Mayer, and Henry, who settled in Alabama as cotton merchants, a springboard to what was to become what Balogun termed “a giant machine” on Wall Street.
Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley, and Ben Miles originally performed the multiple roles of the Lehman brothers and their descendants -male and female, old and young, in London and New York.
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