Monday, August 4, 2008

Greater Lewisville Community Theatre reveals 2008-2009 season

By Pegasus News wire

Greater Lewisville Community Theatre will be looking at love and it's consequences in next season's productions, following the old "Something old, something new,..." poem brides recite. You will recognize some of these shows and some will be brand new -- but isn't that the way love is? Love can be familiar or new and exciting, comfortable or challenging. Here is the lineup for the next year:

• I Love You, You're Perfect, Now Change from August 22—September 7, 2008. Lyrics by Joe DiPietro, music by Jimmy Roberts, and directed by Alan Hanna. Last season, GLCT's presentation of this rousing look at love in its many forms was met with such a response that we decided to bring it back for a second run! If you saw this last September, bring your friends along to share it with them. If you missed it last fall, don't miss it again! This celebration of the mating game takes on the truths and myths behind that contemporary conundrum know as "the relationship." Act I explores the journey from dating and waiting to love and marriage, while Act II reveals the agonies and triumphs of in-laws and newborns, trips in the family car and pick-up techniques of the geriatric set. This hilarious revue pays tribute to those who have loved and lost, to those who have fallen on their face at the portal of romance, to those who have dared to ask, "Say, what are you doing Saturday night?" Proceeds from this show go toward scholarships for deserving Lewisville ISD students.

• Blithe Spirit from October 10—26, 2008. By Noel Coward. (Something old...This 1941 play is well-known to theatre-goers and movie-lovers alike.) Just in time for the Halloween season, GLCT presents this classic romantic haunting. Novelist Charles Condomine invites an eccentric, breezy lady medium into his home in order to learn the language of the occult. Little does Charles or his lovely second wife, Ruth, dream that the seance staged by the medium will summon back Charles' first wife. That mischievous lady from beyond appears and torments Charles, who alone can see or hear her. She has a ghostly plot to get Charles into an automobile accident and make a ghost of him, to join her. Mistakes occur, however, and it is Ruth who takes the fatal automobile ride and passes on only to return with the first wife to team up against Charles.

• A Dickens’ Christmas Carol: A Traveling Travesty in Two Tumultous Acts from November 29—December 14, 2008. By Mark Landon Smith. (Something new...A whole-new take on the beloved Christmas story.) From the author of Faith County and Faith County II comes the funniest Christmas Carol ever. The Styckes Upon Thump Repertory Company embarks on their fifteenth annual tour of the Dickens classic. When the company's diva feigns illness, certain the production will be canceled, this merry troupe of over the hill and upstart actors carry on without her. Roles are shuffled and the sweet understudy suddenly finds herself on stage knowing only one line of dialogue. She has written her part in and on almost everything, including the Christmas pudding! Midway through the doomed performance, the diva rushes in to reclaim her role. Total mayhem ensues as the company scrambles to keep the show going while everything goes hilariously wrong.

• Pride & Prejudice from February 13—March 1, 2009. From the classic novel by Jane Austen. (Something borrowed...from the world of classic literature Miss Jane Austen’s story of love and family.) Mrs. Bennett is determined to get her daughters married. Jane, Elizabeth and Lydia are likely looking girls in a period when a woman's one possible career is matrimony. To be a wife was success. Anything else was failure. Jane and her Mr. Bingley and Lydia with her Mr. Wickham are quite content with things as they are, but not Elizabeth! She actually refuses to marry Mr. Collins, whom she openly deplores, and Mr. Darcy, whom she secretly adores. The play is the story of the duel between Elizabeth and her pride and Darcy and his prejudice. Each gives in before the evening is over and pride and prejudice meet halfway.

• Side Man from April 17—May 3, 2009. By Warren Leight. (Something blue... a powerfully dramatic portrait of a life lived under the influence of jazz.) Side Man is the comic and tender story of Clifford, a young man who looks back on his family life. Prior to leaving home, Clifford reconciles the role that he has long played as parent to his parents. Smoothly gliding between present and past, it tells the story of a time before The Beatles and Elvis, when jazzmen were as heroic as ball players and there was no shortage of Saturday night gigs. Side Man is both a tribute to the men whose lives were their music and a sober look at a family drama left in the wake of that passion.

• Chicago from July 10—August 2, 2009. Book by Fred Ebb and Bob Fosse, music by John Kander, and lyrics by Fred Ebb. Based on the play Chicago by Maurine Dallas Watkins. (And a silver sixpence in her shoe...a wish for wealth and security leads us to this story of a girl's search for fame.) To finish up the season, GLCT explores the fallout of marriage partners with the musical Chicago. The hit of the 1997 Broadway season in a production that originated at City Center's Encore! series of Great American Musicals in Concert, Chicago won six Tony awards including best revival. In razzle dazzle, roaring twenties Chicago, married chorine Roxie Hart murders a faithless lover. Roxie and another murderess on death row vie for the spotlight and the headlines, hoping the publicity will catapult them to fame, freedom and successful stage careers.

Posted by Shawn

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