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Steel Magnolias by Robert Harling

SEASON 98 | 2017-2018

To Kill a Mockingbird

Dramatized by Christopher Sergel

From the book by Harper Lee

September 21**, 22, 23, 24*, 28**, 29, 30*, 30

Oct. 1*, 2017

Scout, a young girl in a quiet southern town, is about to experience dramatic events that will affect the rest of her life. She and brother, Jem, are being raised by their widower father, Atticus, and by their strong-minded housekeeper named Calpurnia. Wide-eyed Scout is fascinated with the sensitively revealed people of her small town but, from the start, there's a rumble of thunder just under the calm surface of the life here. Set in 1935, this play illustrates the social issues of this time period as the black people of the community have a special feeling about Scout's father. In her youthful innocence, she does not know why. A few of her white friends are inexplicably hostile and Scout doesn't understand this either. Unpleasant things are shouted and the bewildered girl turns to her father. Atticus, a lawyer, explains that he is defending a young negro wrongfully accused of a grave crime. Since this is causing such an upset, Scout wants to know why he is doing it. "Because if I didn't," her father replies, "I couldn't hold my head up." When she asks why Atticus would take on such a hopeless fight, he replies, "Simply because we were licked a hundred years before we started is no reason not to try." He goes on to prepare Scout for the trouble to come. "We're fighting our friends. But remember this—no matter how bitter things get, they're still our friends." Things do get bitter, leading up to drastic measures as Atticus props himself in a chair against the cell door of the man he's defending to confront an angry mob. Horrified, Scout projects herself into this confrontation and her inconvenient presence helps bring back a little sanity. Atticus fights his legal battle with a result that is part defeat, part triumph. As Atticus comes out of the courthouse, the deeply moved town minister tells Scout, "Stand up. Your father's passing!" This dramatization of the touching classic tale is a meaningful work of art.

All performances 8:00pm, except:  *Matinee performance 2:00pm | **Evening performances 7:30pm

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Grey Gardens, The Musical

Book by Doug Wright | Music by Scott Frankel 

Lyrics by Michael Korie | Based on the film Grey Gardens 

November 3, 4, 9**, 10, 11, 12*, 16**, 17, 18, 19*, 2017

 

The hilarious and heartbreaking story of Big Edie and Little Edie Bouvier Beale, the eccentric aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, once bright names on the social register who became East Hampton's most notorious recluses.

"To listen to GREY GARDENS is to bring to mind two phrases seldom linked nowadays: 'Broadway musical' and 'artistic integrity.' The songs, with music by Scott Frankel and lyrics by Michael Korie, sustain a level of refined language and psychological detail as elevated as Stephen Sondheim's. The score is a meticulously fashioned piece of musical theater that gains in depth the more you listen to it." —NY Times. "The best musical of the year…GREY GARDENS blooms with creativity…Some of the most tuneful and moving songs to grace an original musical in years. Dig in and enjoy!" —USA Today. "GREY GARDENS is the real deal!" —NY Magazine. "Can a musical be hilarious and heartbreaking at the same time? GREY GARDENS can! Here's that shot in the arm for theater lovers who've been longing for something bold, haunting and hypnotic to get lost in…GREY GARDENS is more than a unique and unmissable musical: It's a gift." —Rolling Stone. "Excellent…a darkly thrilling, quirky and heartbreaking musical…Doug Wright's book tells an emotionally devastating tale of family and freedom. Scott Frankel and Michael Korie's songs are gorgeous—a literate, emotionally rich score." —NY1 News. "Best musical of the year…Broadway's most daring new musical…Grade: A!" —Entertainment Weekly.

**As a side note, this musical was developed in a workshop at White Oak Plantation just north of Jacksonville as part of the Sundance Theatre Institute. Sarah worked with composer Scott Frankel to cast two of our local students to appear in the workshop production. The show went on from workshop phase to Off-Broadway before opening on Broadway and winning multiple Tony Awards.

All performances 8:00pm, except:  *Matinee performance 2:00pm | **Evening performances 7:30pm

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Last Night of Ballyhoo

By Alfred Uhry 

January 12, 13, 18**, 19, 20, 21*, 25**, 26, 27, 28*, 2018 

THE LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO takes place in Atlanta, Georgia, in December of 1939. Gone with the Wind is having its world premiere, and Hitler is invading Poland, but Atlanta's elitist German Jews are much more concerned with who is going to Ballyhoo, the social event of the season. Especially concerned is the Freitag family: bachelor Adolph, his widowed sister, Beulah (Boo) Levy, and their also widowed sister-in-law, Reba. Boo is determined to have her dreamy, unpopular daughter, Lala, attend Ballyhoo, believing it will be Lala's last chance to find a socially acceptable husband. Adolph brings his new assistant, Joe Farkas, home for dinner. Joe is Brooklyn born and bred, and furthermore is of Eastern European heritage—several social rungs below the Freitags, in Beulah's opinion. Lala, however, is charmed by Joe and she hints broadly about being taken to Ballyhoo, but he turns her down. This enrages Boo, and matters get worse when Joe falls for Lala's cousin, Reba's daughter, Sunny, home from Wellesley for Christmas vacation. Will Boo succeed in snaring Peachy Weil, a member of one of the finest Jewish families in the South? Will Sunny and Joe avoid the land mines of prejudice that stand in their way? Will Lala ever get to Ballyhoo? The family gets pulled apart and then mended together with plenty of comedy, romance and revelations along the way. Events take several unexpected turns as the characters face where they come from and are forced to deal with who they really are.

Winner of the 1997 Tony Award for Best Play. "Everything falls into place in this…wonderfully crafted script." —Variety. "Alfred Uhry's charming Broadway comedy (sort of) THE LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO…has a subtext and undertow of thought. It is a delightful comedy freighted with an uncomfortable message." —New York Post. "Alfred Uhry's achingly beautiful play THE LAST NIGHT OF BALLYHOO…is…luminous and powerful. It will most likely find a place in the American canon alongside Uhry's DRIVING MISS DAISY…Uhry draws his characters with so fine a pen, on such a solid foundation, that the story takes on the sharp poignancy of life." —Los Angeles Times.

 

All performances 8:00pm, except:  *Matinee performance 2:00pm | **Evening performances 7:30pm

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Wolf Hall

By Hilary Mantel, adapted for the stage by Mike Poulton 

March 2, 3, 8**, 9, 10, 11*, 15**, 16, 17, 18*, 2018 

 

Mike Poulton’s two-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s Man Booker Prize-winning novels is a thrilling portrait of a brilliant manipulator navigating a high-stakes political landscape. WOLF HALL begins in England in 1527. King Henry VIII needs a male heir, and his anger grows as months pass without the divorce he craves. Into this volatile court enters the commoner Thomas Cromwell. Once a mercenary and now a master politician, he sets out to grant King Henry’s desire while methodically and ruthlessly pursuing his own Reforming agenda.

"The extraordinary enthusiasm for these books across page, stage and screen is partly due to the inherent dramatic power of the narratives…[Mantel and Poulton] bring to the familiar tale of doomed wives and religious convulsion a thrilling originality of psychology and storytelling…absolute dramatic clarity with tantalizing historical ambiguity…Mantel and Poulton, while themselves rewriting history, show the king and his spin doctor doing the same." —Guardian (London). "…opens like ‘House of Cards' and ends like 'Game of Thrones'…Mike Poulton's adaptations keep the language accessible and the political context lucid enough for a general audience. They are also surprisingly funny, with a more broadly comic tone than Mantel's books…elegantly done…History repeats itself, first as farce, then as tragedy…masterful…highly satisfying." —The Hollywood Reporter. "…a superbly tense duet…fiercely intelligent…Mantel's inspired approach, echoed by adaptor Mike Poulton, was to take the decade covering the rise and fall of Anne Boleyn and present everything from an entirely unexpected perspective: that of Cromwell, who rose inexorably from being the son of a blacksmith to becoming the second most powerful man in the kingdom…Poulton ensure[s] the stakes remain high and audiences engaged by the interstices of plots and counterplots." —Variety. "…the real emotional tension resides mainly in the developing intimacy between Henry and Cromwell, and the disbelieving outrage that it provokes in the old aristocracy…an inexorable tragic momentum…a taut intelligence, and a subtle awareness of the parallels between Tudor times and our own…their verve, intelligence and wit are exhilarating." —The Telegraph (London)

All performances 8:00pm, except:  *Matinee performance 2:00pm | **Evening performances 7:30pm

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Boeing Boeing

By Marc Camoletti

Translated by Beverly Cross and Francis Evans 

April 20, 21, 26**, 27, 28, 29*, May 3**, 4, 5, 6*, 2018 

This 1960’s French farce adapted for the English-speaking stage features self-styled Parisian lothario Bernard, who has Italian, German, and American fiancées, each a beautiful airline hostess with frequent “layovers.” He keeps “one up, one down, and one pending” until unexpected schedule changes bring all three to Paris, and Bernard’s apartment, at the same time.

"This latest edition of a play named for an aircraft soars right out of its time zone and into some unpolluted stratosphere of classic physical comedy. Propelled by the same gusty spirit that animated Commedia dell'Arte and the silent films of Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd, [this] may be earthy, but it's seldom earthbound." - The New York Times "This is, by many an airmile, the funniest show on the London stage." - Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph "I cannot remember experiencing a West End evening of such sheer, silly, comic pleasure." - Nicholas de Jongh, - Evening Standard "Fasten your seatbelts for the most deliriously funny flight of your life." - Georgina Brown, Mail on Sunday 

All performances 8:00pm, except:  *Matinee performance 2:00pm | **Evening performances 7:30pm

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Mamma Mia!

Music and lyrics by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus

And some songs with Stig Anderson

Book by Catherine Johnson

Originally conceived by Judy Craymer

June 8, 9, 14**, 15, 16, 17*, 21**, 22, 23, 24, 2018  

Over 54 million people all around the world have fallen in in love with the characters, the story and the music that make Mamma Mia! the ultimate feel-good show! A mother. A daughter. Three possible dads. And a trip down the aisle you'll never forget!

Writer, Catherine Johnson's, sunny and funny tale unfolds on a Greek island paradise. On the eve of her wedding, a daughter's quest to discover the identity of her father brings three men from her mother's past back to the island they last visited 20 years ago.

The story-telling magic of ABBA's timeless songs propels this enchanting tale of love, laughter and friendship, creating an unforgettable show. A large cast, non-stop laughs and explosive dance numbers combine to make Mamma Mia! a guaranteed smash hit for any theatre. 

All performances 8:00pm, except:  *Matinee performance 2:00pm | **Evening performances 7:30pm

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