‘Wolf Hall,’ adaptation of Hilary Mantel novels, coming to Broadway

The recent stage adaptations of Hilary Mantel’s novels “Wolf Hall” and “Bring Up the Bodies” will be coming to Broadway next year, where they will run in repertory for a combined 5 1/2 hours of historical drama.

Producers said Thursday that the two plays are scheduled to open at the Winter Garden Theatre on April 9.

“Wolf Hall: Parts 1 and 2,” written for the stage by Mike Poulton, has already been seen in Britain, where the Royal Shakespeare Company has produced the cycle at Stratford and in London. The three lead actors from the London production will transfer with the plays to New York.

Ben Miles plays the role of Thomas Cromwell, the 16th century English statesman who played a key role in the Reformation and who was eventually executed in 1540. The cast includes Nathaniel Parker as King Henry VIII and Lydia Leonard as Anne Boleyn.

Mantel’s novels received widespread acclaim when they were published, with both winning the Man Booker Prize. (The first, “Wolf Hall,” also won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction.) The two books, published in 2009 and 2012, have a combined length of more than 1,000 pages.

“Wolf Hall” is scheduled to begin previews in New York on March 20. The plays are currently running in repertory on London’s West End through early October.

Multi-part stage productions are rare on Broadway but not unheard of. Tom Stoppard’s “The Coast of Utopia” was a three-part historical epic that ran in repertory and won the Tony Award for best play in 2007. A recent production of Alan Ayckbourn’s “The Norman Conquests,” another three-parter, won the Tony for revival of a play in 2009.

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