The season of seasons is at hand. The first local production of Spring Awakening, the American premiere of a 1934 Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein musical, the revival of an SF-born lesbian classic, and a new musical set during a Big Apple blackout represent a sampling from each of the four Bay Area theater companies that have recently announced their 2011-12 seasons.
San Jose Rep, which had been tottering artistically and financially, seems to have righted itself in the current season, and will be rocking into its 30th in September. Artistic Director Rick Lombardo promises an "entirely new staging" for Spring Awakening, the 2007 Tony winner that added modern musical stylings to the story of 19th-century teenage sexual angst.
The seven-play season also includes the Bay Area premiere of Yasmina Reza's harsh family drama God of Carnage, a world-premiere adaptation of James Cain's novel Double Indemnity, and the area premiere of the AA bio-drama Bill W. and Dr. Bob, as well as Joe DiPietro's senior-citizen love story The Last Romance, Lombardo's new version of A Christmas Carol, and local playwright favorite Therese Rebeck's The Understudy. More info at www.sjrep.com.
With a $25,000 helping hand from the National Endowment for the Arts, 42nd Street Moon will present its restoration of the Kern-Hammerstein musical Three Sisters as part of its 2011-12 season. With no relationship to the similarly titled Chekhov play, the musical about a photographer and his daughters' worldwide adventures was abandoned after the failure of its 1934 London debut. Moon Artistic Director Greg MacKellan and Musical Director Dave Dobrusky have reassembled a script and score from various sources for the December production.
The Moon season at the Eureka Theatre also includes Cole Porter's Nymph Errant (1933), George and Ira Gershwin's Oh, Kay! (1926), Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's Sugar (1972) and Kander and Ebb's Zorba (1968). The troupe devoted to seldom-seen musicals also continues its salon series at the Alcazar Theatre, with a tribute to Cole Porter in September and Jerry Herman in January. More info at www.42ndstmoon.org.
TheatreWorks gets an early start on the 2011-12 season with the July opening of the world premiere of Fly by Night, a new musical by Will Connolly, Michael Mitnick, and Kim Rosenstock about a hapless sandwich maker who finds himself during New York's blackout of 1965. It was developed during TheatreWorks' 2010 New Works Festival, and its full staging will launch the 2011 New Works festival of workshop productions.
Another TheatreWorks world premiere is set in post-Katrina New Orleans, as an onstage jazz band adds mood to the family drama of Dan Dietz's Clementine in the Lower 9 for the October run. Still another world premiere will conclude the season in June 2012, as the pop-rock trio GrooveLily (Striking 12 ) returns to TheatreWorks with Wheelhouse, which tells the funny-awful adventures of a band on the road.
More upcoming TheatreWorks productions, split between the Lucie Stern Theatre in Palo Alto and the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, include a new adaptation of Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility, the Broadway musical based on The Secret Garden, the recent Broadway play about unlikely art celebrities in Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, Carly Mensch's contemporary comedy about historical re-enactors Now Circa Then, and a stage adaptation by John Steinbeck of his own novella Of Mice and Men. More info at www.theatreworks.org.
The Magic Theatre, with an improving financial situation, is returning to a five-play schedule for the 2011-12 season. Three of those titles have been announced, including Claire Chafee's Why We Have a Body. First seen at the Magic in 1993, it has gone on to become a classic comedy of modern lesbian life. The other two titles thus far announced for the upcoming season are both world premieres: In Bruja, Luis Alfaro (Oedipus el Rey ) finds redemption for a scorned sorceress, and in Jesus in India, Lloyd Suh (American Hwangap) offers a contemporary parable imagining Jesus' lost teen years. More info at www.magictheatre.org.
Virgin territory
While the Magic Theatre is planning on a full production of Lloyd Suh's Jesus in India for its new season, you can hear the playwright himself read his script and join in a post-reading discussion. Suh will read Jesus in India on March 7 at SF's Jewish Community Center. It's the first of four Monday night readings by playwrights of new works in the Virgin Play Reading Series co-sponsored by the JCC's Friend Center for the Arts and the Magic Theatre.
Other offerings in the series are Jackie Sibblies Drury's We Are Proud to Present a Presentation About the Herero of Namibia, Formerly Known as South-West Africa, from the German Sudwestafrika, Between the Years 1884-1915 (March 14), which examines colonial and post-colonial racism; Linda McLean's Any Given Day (March 21), a bifurcated family drama about an aunt and uncle waiting for their niece's visit, and the counterpoint story of her alternate plans; and A. Rey Pamatmat's Edith Can Shoot Straight and Hit Things (March 28), about an abandoned teen and her young sibling trying to cope on their own on a remote farm.
All readings take place at 7 p.m. in Gallanter Hall. Call 292-1233 or go to www.jccsf.org/arts.
Richard Dodds can be reached at [email protected].