|
|
The 2004-5 Season |
 Off-Broadway Musical Smash Oct 28-Nov 13, 2004 |
 New England Premier May 5-21, 2005 |
 Shakespearean Spoof March 3-19, 2005 |
 Molière's Classic July 21-Aug 6, 2005 |
 |
|
October 28 - November 20, 2004 |
|
|
The American musical is very much alive! These days, you can find it flying through fresh and fanciful subject matter on and off Broadway. BAT BOY: The Musical, first produced in LA in 1997 and then in New York in 2001, is one such new musical. In it, we meet the folks who make Hope FallS, W. Va., their home. It's a small farming community not usually at the center of attention - except, perhaps, on the cover of the grocery store tabloids. The excitement begins when a trio of kids goes spelunking and discovers something, well, very big and very odd and very unexpected living down in that cavern. Everyone in town has a different idea of what this creature is and how it ought to be dealt with. The story has a few wild twists - and it gets a little messy - before it wraps up, but it's sure to keep you entertained and will undoubtedly have you rethinking your concept of what a musical is. This play contains material which may not be suitable for all audiences. -- It's amazing what intelligent wit can accomplish. A jaggedly imaginative mix of skewering humor and energetic glee. --The New York Times  Cast List and Production Credits
Photos
Visit BAT BOY's
Off-Broadway web-page.
|
|
|
|
|
March 3-19, 2005 |
|
|
"Ghosts are hellzapoppin" in Lee Blessing's self-described "metaphysical farce,"
Fortinbras, a comic interplay of wry literary criticism
and contemporary wit which
takes up where William Shakespeare's Hamlet left off.
As inescapably relevant to today's
political scene as the classic from which it is drawn,
Fortinbras cannot help but
raise questions about authority and leadership,
yet with its mocking (and loving)
reverence for Shakespeare's vision, Blessing's play comes closer
in tone to Rosencrantz
And Guildenstern Are Dead
--sexy, inquisitive, and ultimately satisfying to the revisionist
theater-lover.
Chosen by Time magazine as one of the year's ten best plays for 1991, calling it "Lee Blessing's splendid musing on the most influential play in the English language..." "This comedy serves up a yuppie, postmodern Fortinbras, a bewildered Horatio, a blossoming Osric and lots of tasty ghosts." --LA Times "...only Blessing would possess the nerve and the talent to undertake such a task...Where we suffered and wailed at the consequences of Shakespeare's tragedy, we can laugh along with Blessing at what follows in its wake...Shakespeare himself would have loved it." --Drama-Logue Cast List and Production Credits
Photos
|
|
|
|
|
|
May 5-21, 2005 |
|
|
Thirty year old Jamie is visiting his parents,
Edward and Alice, for the weekend. What Jamie
discovers is that he has arrived on the weekend
that his father has chosen to leave his mother
for another woman. Unable to change his father's
mind, Jaime watches helplessly as his parents'
marriage crumbles, and his mother is overwhelmed
with bewilderment and pain. This is a play
without villains-both Edward and Alice are
good people trying to do their best-but the
damage done by Edward's departure is devastating.
Jamie, caught in the middle, tries to help and
can't, and slowly realizes that he's not an
impartial witness but one of the combatants.
His struggle is to understand both his parents
and, like them, to survive the emotional
hurricane that has ripped through their lives.
"Riveting…subtle and powerful, [with] marvelous emotional complexity.” — The New Yorker “A tense family drama…spare, emotionally brutal.” —Time Out “A truly devastating piece of theater.” - Daily News “The best new play in twenty years…This perfectly written masterwork shimmers with delicacy and precision.” —Journal News. |
|
|
|
|
|
July 21-Aug 6, 2005 |
|
|
Molière (Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673) made a career of
mocking the foibles, preoccupations and corruption of French
culture. And The Learned Ladies, his next-to-last play,
gave him ample opportunity to ridicule the
pretensions of faux intellectualism, including the cults of
grammar, philosophy and astronomy that were in vogue in his time.
His leading characters, colorfully caricatured in typical Molière
fashion, are three credulous, aristocratic, female pedants --
a mother and two daughters who are easy prey for intellectual
frauds -- who prove more adept at botched romantic manipulations
than any discipline of learning.
The mother is intent on matching one of her daughters to the
charlatan poet to whom they have become devotees. But the usually
timid, henpecked husband, who sees through the fake’s greed,
has plans of his own.
The passing of time has rendered Molière's simple domestic comedy,
The Learned Ladies,
socially provocative and even controversial. Its content, once considered
light fare with a dash of proper moral instruction, now occasionally
seems mocking, sometimes sexist, and even abusive in its rhetoric.
But the beauty of Molière’s satiric genius is that the comedy is so
well written and so evenly distributed in its gleeful, wicked attacks
on human foibles that it is practically timeless in interpretation.
Read more about Molière. |
|
|
|