Matthew Warchus
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Matthew Warchus is the first director since A.J. Antoon 36 years ago to be nominated against himself for a Tony. The 42-year-old Englishman, cited three times previously (for Art, True West and last year's Boeing-Boeing), will go up against Bartlett Sher (Joe Turner's Come and Gone) and Phyllida Lloyd (Mary Stuart) as well as himself. Warchus was nominated for both God of Carnage, with its starry American quartet of actors (Jeff Daniels, Hope Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, James Gandolfini), and The Norman Conquests, whose ensemble cast of six Brits are all but unknown in the States. But far from lingering in New York to soak up compliments, the director was busy back home in London the very week of the nominations with a workshop of the forthcoming stage musical version of the Bruce Joel Rubin film, Ghost, due to open on the West End next year. The amiable director has been married for eight years to the American actress/singer Lauren Ward, with whom he has three children. Broadway.com caught up with the busy helmer at the end of a day's work to talk about delivering Alan Ayckbourn across the Atlantic, bringing God of Carnage to the boil, and what it means to move from directing Ayckbourn, Mamet and Chekhov to something like Ghost.
You've achieved a double Tony nomination in a single category for directing, not seen on Broadway since 1973.
That's ironic, since that's the year The Norman Conquests was written.
The success in New York of this Old Vic production of Alan Ayckbourn's trilogy must be especially pleasing.
It is, not least because I was the person pushing to get it to New York. I was the person who got Sonia [producer Sonia Friedman] in and said to her, ‘Surely there might be a way of doing this on Broadway; give me two weeks to make some phone calls and see if anyone bites.' I am often told when I bring things to New York that they probably won't work—that they're very French or very British or very dated. I'm always being warned. I was warned on Boeing-Boeing, Art and God of Carnage, as well....