The Royal Court has confirmed the cast for Tarell Alvin McCraney’s Wig Out!, which opens in the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs on 28 November, after previews from 20 November.
The cast includes Danny Sapani, Leon Lopez, Kate Gillespie, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett, Kevin Harvey, Alex Lanipekun, Holly Quin-Ankrah, Craig Stein and Jessika Williams. They are directed by Royal Court Artistic Director Dominic Cooke.
Wig Out! transforms the Royal Court into the legendary House of Light, a hyper-glamorous, über-competitive drag queen refuge where a daughter who was once a son can find a family. While the members of the House are primping and preening for a catwalk showdown with the other houses, drag queen Nina is wooing the delectable Eric under the guise of ‘Wilson’, a de-camped, make-up free ‘straight’ gay man.
Sapani’s theatre credits include Big White Fog at the Almeida in 2007, The Overwhelming, His Dark Materials and Antony And Cleopatra at the National Theatre, Macbeth for Out of Joint, Never Land at the Royal Court and To The Green Fields Beyond at the Donmar Warehouse. His television work includes The Bill and Ultimate Force.
Lopez can currently be seen in the revival of Pam Gems’s Piaf at the Donmar Warehouse, which opened this week. He played Collins in Rent Remixed at the Duke of York’s last year and appeared in a tour of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Lopez has television credits including Brookside and Hollyoaks In The City. Also a singer, he appeared on celebrity singing competition Soapstar Superstar and went on to release an album.
Gillespie was most recently seen playing Pearl, one of the Dynamites in the musical Hairspray at the Shaftesbury; Stewart-Jarrett appeared in The History Boys at the Wyndham’s; Williams played Saint Monica in The Last Days Of Judas Iscariot at the Almeida earlier this year; and Stein appeared with Lopez in Rent Remixed.
Playwright McCraney’s previous play The Brothers Size ran to great acclaim at the Young Vic last year and is revived again this October along with another of his works, In The Red And Brown Water.
CB