When the musical comedy A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder premiered at Hartford Stage in the fall of 2012, few were thinking that the show would be opening on Broadway one year later, never mind winning a Tony Award for outstanding new musical, along with one for its costumer Linda Cho and another one for its director Darko Tresnjak, artistic director of Hartford Stage.

Now the show returns to the city where it all began when the national tour plays The Bushnell through Sunday, Oct. 30.

|“It’s been an extraordinary for the theater and myself,” says Tresnjak, who says Tony night remains the highlight of his life, in no small part because he was able to share it with his ailing mother before she died.

John Rapson now plays the multiple members of the horrid aristocratic D’Ysquith family, succeeding Clinton’s Jefferson Mays, who originated the role in Hartford and went on to Broadway, where he received a Tony nomination.

One by one, the D’Ysquiths end up dead at the hands of a charming, down-on-his-heels, oh-so-distant relative as he makes his way to a Downton Abbey-sized inheritance.

Tresnjak says he wasn’t looking for a clone of Mays—whom he sees as a sui generis actor—for the tour.

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