‘Brokeback Mountain’ Play Coming To the West End, Starring Lucas Hedges!

Based on Annie Proulx's short story of the same name, Brokeback Mountain is now set to become a play on London's West End. Previously adapted for the screen in the three-time Oscar-winning Ang Lee film starring Jake Gyllenhaal and the late, great Heath Ledger, Brokeback Mountain is slated to hit Broadway's counterpart abroad this May.

 

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The “play with music” will star Lucas Hedges (Oscar-nominee, Manchester by the Sea) and Mike Faist (BAFTA-nominee, West Side Story) as gay cowboys Ennis and Jack. This marks the West End debut for both actors, though both are Broadway veterans. Hedges won a Theatre World Award in 2017 for his starring role in the play The Waverly Gallery. And Faist made his debut in the hit musical Newsies before going on to star in the original Broadway cast of Dear Evan Hansen, for which he was nominated for a Tony Award. Though Faist is straight, Hedges has come out as sexually fluid.

The adaptation was written by actor-turned-writer Ashley Robinson, but it will also include musical elements because, hey... if you're gonna make one of the most iconic gay movies of all time into a stage show, it's gotta be at least somewhat of a musical, right? The songs have been written by Dan Gillespie Sells (the gay British singer-songwriter who was the frontman of the rock group The Feeling and wrote the hit gay musical Everybody's Talking About Jamie) and will be performed on-stage by the Balladeer, played by Scottish singer-songwriter Eddi Reader, and backed by a full country western band.

Robinson said that the decision to include songs within the play helped to “give voice to the tumultuous inner landscape of our wannabe cowboys (both men of few words), and provide the scope of our vast and tough outer landscape, not to mention allowing Proulx’s poetic prose to literally sing."

Brokeback Mountain is set to open at London’s Soho Place and will run from May 10 through August 12, 2023. So if you're in the area this Spring, make sure to check out this world-premiere production. And fingers crossed it finds its gay little way across the pond over to us here in the states! Oooh, I wonder how they’re going to do the spit lube scene. If they need a consultant…

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