Violet on 44th Street, Lisa Rinna and Harry Hamlin Take the Broadhurst

Lisa Rinna and her husband, Harry Hamlin, begin Broadway previews of It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play at the Broadhurst Theatre on Wednesday, November 4, and in January Rinna moves straight into an Off-Broadway revival of Neil Simon's Rumors.

Two shows. One winter. Almost no time off between them.

West 44th Street is about to get a holiday radio studio. The production stages Frank Capra's 1946 story as a live 1940s broadcast, with a foley artist making the sound effects in plain view and carols in the mix, according to BroadwayWorld's report on the marquee going up.

Who Is in It's a Wonderful Life on Broadway?

Five actors play the whole town of Bedford Falls. Andrew Rannells is George Bailey and Megan Hilty is Mary. Tituss Burgess plays Clarence, the angel, along with other parts. Hamlin is the banker Mr. Potter and others. Rinna plays Violet and others.

Rannells was last on 57th Street reuniting the original cast of the Falsettos revival at Carnegie Hall. Here he gets the leading man who wishes he had never been born.

Jerry Zaks, a four-time Tony winner, directs. Joe Landry wrote the adaptation, which first played in 1996 at the Stamford Center for the Arts in Connecticut and has since become one of the most produced plays in the country. Both the play and the film trace back to Philip Van Doren Stern's 1943 short story The Greatest Gift. This year is the film's 80th anniversary.

Previews start November 4. Opening night is Wednesday, November 18, according to Playbill's Broadway schedule, and the run is nine weeks, closing Sunday, January 3, 2027. Two standbys, Jeanna de Waal and Martin Landry, cover all the principal roles, TicketNews reports.

What Comes After the Broadhurst?

Rumors does. Rinna leads the first of two Real Housewives companies in Simon's 1988 farce at the Newman Mills Theater, inside the Robert W. Wilson MCC Theater Space at 511 West 52nd Street. Performances begin January 9, 2027, and opening night is January 25, according to Playbill's casting report.

She plays Chris, opposite Phaedra Parks as Claire, Stacey Rusch as Cookie and Dolores Catania as Cassie, through February 28. On March 2 a second company takes the same four roles. Cynthia Bailey, Eileen Davidson, Carole Radziwill and Candiace Dillard-Bassett play through April 21. The husbands have not been cast yet.

Zhailon Levingston, who won a Tony for Cats: The Jellicle Ball, directs. He has promised not to touch the script. "Without changing a single word of Simon's brilliant text, we can reveal something new in the piece," he said in a statement quoted by Time Out New York.

Two shows. One winter. Almost no time off between them.

Rinna's New York Calendar, by Our Count

Suite 646 lined up the published dates. This is our own arithmetic, built from the producers' announced schedules.

From the first Broadway preview on November 4 to her last scheduled Rumors performance on February 28 is 116 days. The Broadhurst gets 14 days of previews before opening night and 60 days from first preview to closing. Then comes the gap. It's a Wonderful Life closes on January 3 and Rumors begins on January 9. That leaves six days between the two shows.

There is a neat loop in the addresses too. The original Broadway production of Rumors played the Broadhurst and closed in February 1990, Playbill notes. So Rinna leaves the house where Rumors first ran and takes Rumors across town.

Have Rinna and Hamlin Done This Before?

They have. Rinna played Roxie Hart in Chicago as a summer replacement at the Ambassador Theatre in 2007, with Hamlin as Billy Flynn, according to her Wikipedia biography. Hamlin's Broadway credits go back further, to Awake and Sing! in 1984 and Summer and Smoke in 1996. The two married in 1997.

That earlier run matters for Rumors. Time Out counts seven of the eight Housewives in the cast as making their New York stage debuts. Rinna, a Real Housewives of Beverly Hills cast member from 2014 to 2022, has been on Broadway before. Hamlin, best known for L.A. Law and Clash of the Titans, turned 75 on Friday.

What to Know Before You Go

The Broadhurst Theatre is at 235 West 44th Street. It's a Wonderful Life runs November 4, 2026, through January 3, 2027. Rumors plays the MCC building on West 52nd Street, the same house that opened its 40th season with Anon in October, from January 9 through April 21, 2027, with Rinna's company through February 28.

Mr. Potter at the Broadhurst until January. Then a farce on 52nd Street. Somebody in this marriage gets the nicer part.