Cedric the Entertainer will step onto Broadway on April 25 in August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, leading a new revival at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre with Taraji P. Henson alongside him. Debbie Allen is directing the production, which returns the play to the same house where it first opened on Broadway in 1988.
Cedric stars as Seth Holly, while Henson plays Bertha Holly in the revival. Wilson’s play first reached Broadway on March 27, 1988, when Delroy Lindo played Herald Loomis and Angela Bassett played Martha Pentecost in a production that ran 105 performances and was nominated for six Tony Awards.
The new staging arrives after Joe Turner already proved durable on Broadway. The play was revived in 2009 at the Belasco Theatre, where it ran from April 16 to June 14, lasted 69 performances and won two Tony Awards. That makes it the most-revived play in Wilson’s body of work, and one of the clearest markers of how often theaters have returned to his writing.
Joe Turner occupies the 1910s chapter of Wilson’s Century Cycle, the 10-play series also known as the Pittsburgh Cycle, which tracks Black culture and experience across each decade of the 20th century. The play itself debuted in 1984 as a staged reading at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut before opening at Yale Repertory Theatre in 1986 and then reaching Broadway two years later. Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2006.
The practical question now is whether this revival can do more than trade on the play’s history. It has the cast, the director and the rare distinction of returning to the same Broadway theatre as the original, but its test begins when the curtain goes up and audiences decide whether this chapter of Wilson’s cycle still feels immediate in 2026.