Band Wagon, Greenberg, Etc. Join Old Globe Line-Up

According to the San Diego Union Tribune, the Old Globe Theatre has announced a complete 10-production winter season with the new musical A Catered Affair, a stage adaptation of the classic film musical The Band Wagon and the West Coast premiere of a new Richard Greenberg play among the highlights.

As previously announced, Harvey Fierstein will star in and write the book for A Catered Affair, which will run from September 20th through October 28th. The Broadway-bound musical will feature music and lyrics by John Bucchino (It's Only Life) and direction by Tony Award-winner John Doyle (Company, Sweeney Todd).

The classic MGM musical The Band Wagon, a witty backstage fable that starred Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse and Oscar Levant in its 1953 film version, will be adapted by Douglas Carter Beane (The Little Dog Laughed, Xanadu) from the screenplay by the legendary Betty Comden and Adolph Green (the two never fully completed it, and Beane picks up where they left off).  The Band Wagon film featured a score by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz, and includes such songs as "By Myself," "Dancing in the Dark," "Triplets" and "That's Entertainment."  The stage version will feature additional songs from the Schwartz-Dietz catalog.  It will open in March of 2008.

"The budget for the Globe show will be enhanced by commercial producers Fran and Barry Weissler, so a later Broadway date is possible," according to the article.

The West Coast premiere of Richard Greenberg's The American Plan will play the Old Globe's Carter Theatre from February 23rd through March 30th, 2008.  The play is about "a German emigre mother, her marriage-age daughter and the suitor she meets in the Catskills."  Greenberg's other plays include A Naked Girl on the Appian Way, Three Days of Rain, The House in Town and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Take Me Out.  The theatre will also present the West Coast premiere of Howard Korder's The Sea of Tranquility, concerning a Connecticut couple heading west, from January 12th through February 17th. Korder (Search and Destroy) is the theatre's playwright-in-residence.  Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt's Oscar and the Pink Lady, described as "an uplifting story about a hospital patient and the elderly volunteer who visits him," will have its American premiere from Sept. 22nd to Oct. 28th, 2008.

The Old Globe will also present Hersey Felder's (George Gershwin Alone, Monsieur Chopin) new play about the great Romantic composer, Beethoven As I Knew Him, from May 3rd through June 8th, 2008, Steven Drukman's In This Corner, a play about boxer Joe Louis, directed by Ethan McSweeny and running from January 5th through February 10th, as well as the 10th anniversary production of Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and a revival of Tennessee Williams' classic memory play The Glass Menagerie, directed by Joe Calarco, running from April 12th through May 18th, 2008. 

Visit www.oldglobe.org for more information.

Photo of Douglas Carter Beane by Walter McBride/Retna Ltd.