Tom Hanks to Make Broadway Debut in Nora Ephron's 'Lucky Guy'

NEW YORK -- Confirming a casting coup that had been rumored since before the death of Nora Ephron, Tom Hanks will make his Broadway debut in the late playwright and screenwriter's Lucky Guy, about the career highs and lows of controversial tabloid reporter Mike McAlary in 1980s New York.

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The two-time Oscar winning actor had a long association and friendship with Ephron, having starred in her 1993 hit, Sleepless in Seattle, and You've Got Mail in 1998.

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The play will be directed by George C. Wolfe, who won Tony Awards for his staging of Tony Kushner's Angels in America: Millennium Approaches in 1993 and for the musical Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk in 1996. More recently, he directed the acclaimed 2011 Broadway production of Larry Kramer's The Normal Heart.

Lucky Guy begins previews March 1 at the Broadhurst Theatre, with the limited engagement set for official opening on April 1. Additional casting is to be announced.

A longtime tabloid-scene fixture who started his professional life covering the police beat for the New York Daily News, McAlary was clearly a fascinating figure for Ephron, who began her career in newspaper journalism. Her play charts the reporter's rise, fall and subsequent return to glory with his Pulitzer-winning coverage of the NYPD's brutalization of Abner Louima in Brooklyn in 1997. McAlary died of colon cancer the following year at age 41.

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The producing team on the play is Colin Callender, Roy Furman, Arielle Tepper Madover, Roger Berlind, Stacey Mindich, Robert Cole and Frederick Zollo, David Mirvish, Daryl Roth, James D. Stern/Douglas L. Meyer, Scott and Brian Zeilinger, in association with Sonia Friedman Productions and The Shubert Organization.