Nathan Lane
Photo: Bruce Glikas/WireImage
Nathan Lane’s Death of a Salesman will, like Scott Rudin, return to Broadway. Lane will star alongside Laurie Metcalf in Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize–winning masterpiece, fulfilling the prophecy that was first revealed, then indefinitely postponed, in 2020. Their sons, Biff and Happy Loman, will be played by Girls star Christopher Abbott and The Gilded Age’s “Clock Twink,” Ben Ahlers, respectively. The production will be directed by Joe Mantello, who collaborated with Metcalf and Rudin already this Broadway season on Little Bear Ridge Road. Salesman will come to Winter Garden Theatre for a limited 14-week run, beginning previews on March 6, 2026, ahead of an April 9 opening.
“In 1995 while rehearsing a Terrence McNally play with Joe, he turned to me one afternoon out of the blue and quietly said, ‘Someday you and I are going to do Death of a Salesman,’” Lane said in a statement. “And true to his word, 30 years later, that day has come. I couldn’t be more thrilled and honored to follow in the footsteps of so many great actors in tackling the role of Willy Loman, especially with the brilliant Laurie Metcalf by my side and the remarkable cast Joe is assembling. It’s a privilege to do what is arguably the greatest drama of the twentieth century, and like all great plays it always seems to speak to us anew each time we see it.”
Lane first told The Hollywood Reporter that he would star in a Rudin-produced Salesman with Metcalf in February 2020, expecting the production to come to Broadway in 2021. That obviously did not happen owing to the global pandemic shutting down the theater industry. Rudin was subsequently accused of abuse by several former assistants in 2021 and said he would step back “from active participation” in his plays and musicals. During that time, a different Death of a Salesman hit Broadway in 2022, starring Wendell Pierce and Sharon D. Clarke, and garnered Pierce a Tony nomination for Best Actor. Rudin already came back to Broadway to produce LBRR earlier this year in addition to producing the Off Broadway run of Wallace Shawn’s What We Did Before Our Moth Days in February. The salesman might have died, but Rudin’s career seemingly never will.
