Lenny Wolpe: Last News

Frank Rizzo After the Great Recession of ’08 — not to mention anxiety about the current economy — will a Reagan-era comedy about insider trading and the glory of greed get the same laughs? Can it sing, too?In the 1983 movie “Trading Places,” the life of a financial manager is switched with a Philly street hustler when two filthy-rich commodities brokers — brothers Mortimer and Randolph Duke  — make a nature-versus-nurture wager and puppet-master their secret social experiment. The same prince-and-pauper plot outline applies to the latest film-to-musical treatment premiering this month at Atlanta’s Alliance Theatre, which last launched the joyous “The Prom” to New York — and before that, the less successful “Tuck Everlasting.” But this screwball switcheroo still has a long way to go before it’s a safe Broadway bet.

A world premiere musical stage adaptation that reimagines the hit 1983 Eddie Murphy-Dan Aykroyd comedy Trading Places has cast Freestyle Love Supreme‘s Aneesa Folds in the role that made Murphy a Hollywood superstar, with Bryce Pinkham (Broadway’s A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder) in the Aykroyd spot.