wait for *Long Day's Journey* — but worth it

ARt will not produce O'Neill's tragedy this January but next fall (probably as the second show in its 2007-08 season, approximately a year from now).
Best of all, the role of patriarch James Tyrone will be performed by David Ogden Stiers, who's best known as Major Charles Emerson Winchester III on *MASH* (1977-83), but also as the voice of numerous Disney animated characters (Cogsworth in *Beauty and the Beast* (1991), Governor Ratcliffe in "Pocahontas* (1995), the Archdeacon in *The Hunchback of Notre Dame* ('96), and Dr. Jumba Jookiba in *Lilo and Stitch* (2002; and all its TV spinoffs), and such movies as *The Majestic,* *Krippendorf's Tribe* and Woody Allen's *The Curse of the Jade Scorpion* — and many, many TV shows. Stiers also plays the father in next year's film version of Reed McColm's *Together Again for the First Time* (the stage version of which we were supposed to see next month at ARt, but oh, well ...).
Even better, Stiers' "attachment" to the "project" (does Bobo sound appropriately insider-y and all *Variety*-style talk here?) has attracted the interest of other well-known actors for the parts of Edmund and Mary Tyrone. (Can't say more yet.)

Bobo witnessed Stiers' King Lear and Oberon (in *MND*) at the San Diego National Shakespeare Festival, c. 1977-78 -- along with several other roles he did, including a hilarious Dogberry in *Much Ado,* and let me tell ya, folks — this is a stage actor of great sensitivity and renown.