EXCLUSIVE: When the announcement was made in January that Emma Donoghue had developed a play (with music) of her bestselling novel Room and the acclaimed film that followed – and that the play was heading to Broadway – plenty of New Yorkers were filled with questions (Londoners and Canadians had already seen the show).
Some of the answers might be addressed in a new trailer and first-look photo provided exclusively to Deadline.
How can a stage play (with music) adapt a tale of such a troubled, harrowing story of domestic abuse, with its downbeat claustrophobia and mental cruelty, translate to a theater district more welcoming to The Music Mans and Funny Girls of the world.
With the exclusive release to Deadline today of the production’s first trailer and key art, the questioners might get some hints, like the reminder that there are heavy doses of inspiration, hope and love that breathe air into Room.
Starring Tony Award winner Adrienne Warren – looking ever so much different from when we last saw her on Broadway so convincingly transformed into the iconic Tina Turner – Room tells the unnerving, if ultimately inspiring, tale of, as the official synopsis states, a kidnapped teenage girl, Ma (Warren) who has been locked for seven years inside a purpose-built room in her captor’s garden. Her five-year-old son, Jack, has no concept of the world outside and happily exists inside Room with the help of Ma’s games and his vivid imagination where objects like Rug, Lamp and TV are his only friends. But for Ma the time has come to escape and face their biggest challenge to date: the world outside Room.
In the new trailer, we see little of the room itself. Instead we see Warren as Ma comforting her baby as a vaguely spooky rendition of that ode to patience, “She’ll Be Coming Round The Mountain When She Comes” plays on. The only glimpse of the outside world we see is sun shining through a skylight.
Room begins previews on April 3 at the James Earl Jones Theatre, with an official opening night of April 17. Tickets go on sale Monday.
Take a look at the trailer above, and the show’s new poster art below.
