Murder on the Orient Express and Crazy For You at Chichester Festival Theatre this Summer

There is magic in every theatre. 

In some theatres, the magic is overwhelming. Chichester Festival Theatre is one of them. CFT opened its first season 60 years ago, with Sir Laurence Olivier at its helm as Artistic Director.

In those 60 years, the finest actors of the English stage have performed there. In fact, many of the players in CFT’s second season became the core of the first company of The National Theatre: Olivier, Joan Plowright, Robert Stephens, Frank Finlay, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith, Edward Hardwicke, and Edward Petherbridge.

Performances by Ben Kingsley, Eileen Atkins, Ingrid Bergman, Rex Harrison, Alec Guinness, Ian McKellen, and Patrick Stewart—to name a handful out of hundreds—haunt the space. I have long cherished the hope of seeing one of my plays on the stage at Chichester. 

 This summer, my dream is coming true. Twice.

This April, I’ll join director Jonathan Church and the full cast of Murder on the Orient Express for their first rehearsal in London. A month later, we all travel down to the English coast, where we’ll work on that storied stage at CFT before going into previews on May 13th and opening a week later on the 20th. It’s already been an incredible journey, one that started in 2019 and was put on hold for two agonizing years due to the pandemic. Many productions that were shelved when our theatres went dark never got back on their feet, but the design and production teams, and the staff at Chichester Festival Theatre, stuck together and worked themselves silly to make sure that Murder on the Orient Express would come to life at CFT.

I feel tremendously lucky that CFT is producing the European premiere of Murder on the Orient Express. You might think that’s as much luck as one guy could get, but within two weeks of the play’s opening night, I’ll be back in London to join director Susan Stroman and the cast of my musical Crazy for You when they begin rehearsals for the show’s 30th-anniversary revival, which will then open at CFT on July 18th.

Crazy for You had an even longer road to Chichester than Murder on the Orient Express did, and it was similarly postponed due to the pandemic. The shows were originally scheduled for the two consecutive seasons that theatres couldn’t operate in the UK, and when it became clear that Chichester would reopen for a full summer season in 2022, Daniel Evans, the Artistic Director at CFT, put them both on the bill, calling it “The Ludwig Season”.

I can’t wait to see the magic that Chichester Festival Theatre brings to my shows this summer.