A Super Tuesday of Season Announcements

Yesterday most of the country's eyes may have been on the presidential races in Ohio and Texas, but even as Hilary and Obama were squaring off at voting booths, regional theaters around the country were announcing their plans for their 2008-2009 seasons.

You'll find complete articles about each of the theaters I'm about to mention in the ATW News Clippings, but I figured I'd distill the companies' seasons to some particular highlights.

Working from East to West:

Signature Theater in Virginia has announced that they'll be premiering a new musical from Michael John LaChiusa. It's a tuner based on Edna Ferber's novel "Giant" – the work that of course inspired the classic movie of the same name. LaChiusa's Giant will run from April 28 – May 31 next year. Alongside this world premiere will be the area premiere of LaChiusa's See What I Wanna See, which will play April 7 through May 24. As a precursor to these two productions, the theater will offer a short run of LaChiusa's Ladies in its cabaret series. This selection of songs sung by the composer-lyricist's heroines will play March 18-21.

There's one other production that I think is really a must-see, it's Robert Taylor and Richard Oberacker's Ace, a show that has literally taken off since its showing at the National Alliance for Musical Theater Festival a couple of years back. The piece about a small boy and the fantastical toy airplane he's given wowed me then, and I'm delighted to see that the production at Signature (running August 26 through September 28) is being billed as a "Broadway Bound Premiere."

Now let me shift down the coast to Florida, where the Actors Playhouse as announced the musicals that will be part of its upcoming season. Here, there are two that have really caught my eye. First is a world premiere: Miami Bombshells, The Musical. Based on the book "Dish and Tell", this show looks at how women balance their personal and professional lives. "Bombshells" is slated to play January 14 through February 8. The second show that caught my eye in this theater's lineup is the regional premiere of Havana Bourgeois, which played in New York at 59E59 a couple of seasons back. This look at life in a Havana during the early years of the revolution was both imperfect and fascinating when I caught it here. In Florida, "Havana" will run May 6 through June 7.

Shifting to Colorado, two world premieres at the Denver Center Theatre Company are particularly noteworthy: Inana by Michele Lowe and Dusty in the Big Bad World by Cusi Cram. Lowe's piece, which will play January 22 through February 28, centers on an Iraqi museum director, who on the eve of the US invasion of Baghdad, desperately plots to safeguard an ancient statue from the looting he fears will come. He flees to London with his young bride and before he can begin a new life there, he must reveal his own past and the fate of the statue of Inana, Goddess of War. In Cram's play, "Dusty," the most popular animated PBS children's television show in America, goes to visit a family with two daddies, but the big bad world brings the hammer down hard. This play will run in Denver from January 29 through February 28.

Finally, in California, Berkley Repertory Theatre has announced that its coming season will have world premiere of plays by Itamar Moses and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sarah Ruhl.

Ruhl's play - The Vibrator Play - is scheduled to be the theater's opener. This one, set at the end of the Victorian era, focuses on six lonely people who look to a local doctor for relief, but learn they really need intimacy. Moses' Yellowjackets takes place at Berkeley High School and looks at what happens when the school newspaper publishes a story that pushes students into a volatile controversy over race and class.

Berkeley Rep has yet to set the dates for its season which will also include a staging of Mairlyn Campbell and Curt Columbus' 90-minute riveting version of Crime and Punishment.

QUICK LINKS:

Signature Theatre: http://sig-online.org/
Actors Playhouse: http://www.actorsplayhouse.org/
Denver Center Theatre Company: http://www.denvercenter.org/
Berkeley Repertory Theatre: http://www.berkeleyrep.org/