Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson to Star in Scottish Musical's New York Run

Alan Cumming and Shirley Henderson will star in a New York run of A History of Paper, a Scottish musical, according to WhatsOnStage. The show will make its US premiere Off-Broadway in February 2027.

The 13-week engagement runs at Stage 42, a theatre in New York owned by the Shubert Organization, one of the largest Broadway theatre groups. Performances are scheduled from 12 February to 16 May 2027. Tickets go on sale on 17 November.

The production comes from Pitlochry Festival Theatre and Dundee Rep Theatre, working with Sonia Friedman Productions, Jerry Goehring and Pemberley Productions. Andrew Panton, artistic director of Dundee Rep, directs. It is the first time a production from either theatre has moved Off-Broadway, which is the tier of smaller professional theatres in New York that sits below the big Broadway houses.

Cumming became artistic director of Pitlochry Festival Theatre in January 2025. Henderson, the Scottish actor known for her stage and screen work, will share a stage with him for the first time in this show. The two were first announced for the Scottish production in May 2026, as BroadwayWorld reported.

The show has a long road behind it. It started as a BBC Radio 4 play by Oliver Emanuel in 2017. In 2019, Emanuel and composer Gareth Williams developed it as a work-in-progress at Dundee Rep, as part of the theatre's Rep Stripped festival. Its Edinburgh Festival Fringe debut came in 2024 at the Traverse Theatre, where it won a Fringe First Award, the festival's prize for new writing.

Along with the transfer, a theatrical exchange between Pitlochry and Manhattan has been launched. Details of the exchange were set out in the Scottish press on the same day as the New York announcement.

Tickets for the Stage 42 run open to the public on 17 November, twelve days from now. Anyone planning to see it will need to book from that date.