Candace Bushnell, the real-life Carrie Bradshaw, is bringing her one-woman show to the West End for the first time.
The bestselling author – whose newspaper column inspired the hit TV drama Sex and the City – will also tour the UK, sharing her philosophy through stories of fashion, literature and sex.
After its New York premiere at the Daryl Roth theatre, Bushnell’s show, True Tales of Sex, Success and Sex and the City, will launch at the London Palladium in February 2024.
Bushnell will then take the show to other UK locations, including Southampton, Nottingham, Cardiff, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Birmingham, Oxford, Brighton, Leicester and Southend.
Bushnell’s column in the New York Observer was the inspiration behind the Sex and the City TV series, which starred Sarah Jessica Parker and won multiple Emmy, Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards, and led to two successful feature films. The original series finished in 2004, but was revived in 2021 in the sequel series, And Just Like That.
Bushnell’s books and the TV series redefined modern relationships in the 90s and 00s, and turned her into a star.
Bushnell was born in Connecticut in 1958 and moved to New York City in the 1970s. Her stage show covers the time from her arrival in the city with just $20 (£16) in her pocket through to her establishment as a successful writer (she appeared in publications such as Time magazine, the New York Times and Variety magazine and was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey).
A New York Times review of the show said Bushnell “is conversational and accessible on stage; there’s a wonder and humility to her tone even as she settles behind the velvet ropes of high society, which makes her endearing rather than alienating to those looking on from the outside”.
Bushnell’s books include Sex and the City, Is There Still Sex in the City?, Summer and the City, The Carrie Diaries, One Fifth Avenue, Lipstick Jungle, Trading Up, Killing Monica, and Four Blondes.
In 2020, she co-wrote Rules for Being a Girl, a novel based on her experiences of inappropriate male behaviour, inspired by #MeToo. “It’s more overtly feminist than my other books,” she said at the time. “There’s an openness to these kinds of stories that wasn’t there 10 years ago … In the past, if you wanted to write something that was more feminist, you were highly discouraged by publishers.”
She also said that if she were writing Sex and the City today, there would be much more discussion of issues raised by the #MeToo movement. “But it reflected the time we were in … When I was writing Sex and the City back in the 90s, if you were a thirtysomething, single, childless woman, you were considered a bit of an outcast. And now, we consider that woman as the norm, as 50% of their demographic. We don’t consider those women freaks.”
