Kansas City Repertory Theatre To Hold Equity And Non-Equity Auditions 6/25-26

Kansas City Repertory Theatre will hold General Auditions for Equity and Non-Equity Actors. Open auditions for Non-Equity performers will be held on Thursday, June 25, with Equity auditions held on Friday, June 26.

Auditions will take place at 4949 Cherry Street, Kansas City and are by Appointment Only. To schedule an audition appointment for Kansas City Rep's Equity and Non-Equity General Auditions, please call Samantha Dane at 816-235-6088, weekdays between 10 am-4 pm.

Your appointment should not exceed 3 minutes of material, which should include preparing a monologue (comedic or dramatic) and if you are a singer, please prepare 16 bars of a song that best shows off your voice. There will be an accompanist at the auditions.

Please bring a current headshot and resume with updated contact info. You will be auditioning for Kyle Hatley, Kansas City Repertory Theatre's Assistant Artistic Director.

Kansas City Repertory Theatre will present seven plays during the 2009-2010 season, with four shows at Spencer Theatre on the UMKC campus, where Kansas City Rep is the professional theatre in residence, and three productions at Copaken Stage at 13th and Walnut Streets.

Kansas City Rep's 2009-10 season is as follows (dates and titles are subject to change):

Into The Woods
September 11-October 4, 2009 - Spencer Theatre
Directed by Moisés Kaufman
Book by James Lapine
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
Based on Classic Fairy Tales

Broadway director and playwright Moisés Kaufman brings us James Lapine and Stephen Sondheim's Into The Woods. Sondheim's compelling narrative revolves around a story of a childless baker and his wife who attempt to reverse a curse on their family in order to have a child. They are forced to face their fears when they find themselves in the woods with a young Cinderella, a boy named Jack, his mother and the giant he upsets, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, and other fabled characters.

Kaufman is artistic director of Tectonic Theater Project in New York City. His current Broadway show 33 Variations, starring Jane Fonda, opened in MarcH. Kaufman is also well known as the Tony Award-nominated director of I Am My Own Wife (originally produced by Rosen in Chicago), The Laramie Project and Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde, which was produced at Kansas City Rep in 2000.

M. PROUST
October 9-November 22, 2009 - Copaken Stage
Directed by Eric Rosen
Written by Mary Zimmerman
Based on the writings of Celeste Albaret and Marcel Proust

Tony-nominated Broadway star Mary Beth Peil, who is also well known for her television roles on Dawson's Creek and Fringe, gives a riveting one-woman tour-de-force performance in this intense, exploration of genius, obsession and secrets. Written by Mary Zimmerman, one of our greatest theatrical minds who created the Rep's smash hits Metamorphoses and The Arabian Nights, and directed by the Rep's artistic director.

Peil plays Celeste Albaret, who was housekeeper, personal assistant and confidante to the famous French novelist Marcel Proust (1871-1922) during the last decade of his life, a time when the famously neurotic author was immersed in completing his seven-volume masterwork, Remembrance of Things Past. Near the end of her own life, Albaret broke her 50-year silence and wrote a fascinating memoir about her years with one of the world's greatest literary figures, who once told her, "You know everything about me."

Originally premiered in Chicago in a highly acclaimed About Face Theatre/Steppenwolf Theatre co-production, M. Proust is a poignant and surreal exploration of the essence of creativity, obsessive love and memory, and what it means to have one's life swept into the powerful current of genius.

"Exquisite, magical...Mary Zimmerman has devised a richly shaded one-woman show."

-- Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun-Times

Seating at Copaken Stage will be limited to the lower section only.

A CHRISTMAS STORY, THE MUSICAL!
November 20, 2009-January 3, 2010
Directed by Eric Rosen
Book by Joseph Robinette, Music and Lyrics by Scott Davenport Richards
Produced by Gerald Goehring and Michael Jenkins
Based on the Warner Brothers Movie "A Christmas Story" and Jean Shepherd's novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash

One of the most beloved Christmas movie of all time has been adapted for the stage and is quickly becoming one of the most highly anticipated shows in the theatrical world. This new, musical version of the classic holiday tale continues to center around Ralphie, the bespectacled boy whose One Dream is to get a BB-gun for Christmas, despite repeated warnings of "You'll shoot your eye out!" A Christmas Story, the Musical! unforgettably captures every child's holiday wonder with deliciously mischievous wit, a nostalgic eye and a heart of gold. It's a Christmas present that audiences of all ages will embrace and cherish for years to come.

Jean Shepherd (1921-1999), author of In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, was a humorist, raconteur and sometimes-controversial host of New York's popular radio program "Live at the Limelight," during the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

"A Christmas Story is the Rep's first-ever out of town try out for a musical and is now slated to open on Broadway in 2010," said Rosen. "One of the great things about the life of this show is that it will always be credited as having its world premiere at Kansas City Rep." Rosen will direct A Christmas Story, the Musical!, which has a cast of 28 and will be cast locally and nationally.

The Rep's traditional holiday production of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol will go on hiatus for one year while it is redesigned for its 30th anniversary in 2010. "It's really important to me that we honor A Christmas Carol's 30th anniversary with a beautiful new production, so we're going to take a year and put our best minds and designers to work on redesigning it," said Rosen.

AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 DAYS
January 22 - February 21, 2010 - Spencer Theatre
Written and directed by Laura Eason
Adapted from the novel by Jules Verne
A co-production with CENTERSTAGE of Baltimore

Jules Vernes' beloved classic is transformed into a theatrical epic by Laura Eason and Lookingglass Theatre Company of Chicago, one of the greatest physical theatre companies in the world, and originators of Metamorphoses and The Arabian Nights.

The staid and resplendently wealthy Phileas Fogg has taken a gentleman's wager that he can't circumnavigate the earth in 80 days. So confident is he that he can accomplish it, Fogg gambles his entire fortune that he and his unreliable but ever-faithful valet can pull it off. Fogg sets off on a whirlwind race aboard steamships, locomotives and pachyderms as he discovers countless exotic locales, from Calcutta to Hong Kong. Brilliant theatricality results in an elephant chase, a storm at sea, a speeding ice sled, a buffalo chase, a ride in a hot air balloon and many other on-stage marvels.

Around the World in 80 Days is a fast-paced, family-friendly adventure.

BROKE-OLOGY
February 19-March 21 - Copaken Stage
Written by Nathan Louis Jackson

Continuing its commitment to new work and diverse voices, the Rep will stage one of the first productions of Broke-ology, a powerful new play by a young writer who brings fresh perspectives to the struggles of the next generation in our city. Emerging playwright Nathan Jackson, who grew up in Kansas City, Kansas and trained at Juilliard, taps into his local roots with his absorbing family drama set in his hometown. Broke-ology examines the struggles of an African American family living in a lower middle class neighborhood. When brothers Ennis and Malcolm are called upon to care for their aging father, difficult choices are set in motion: who will follow the life he dreams of and who will stay behind? Will it be Malcolm, the first in the family to attend college, or Ennis, who relies on his street smarts and considers himself a scholar of "broke-ology," which is what he calls the study of being broke and staying alive?

"Thematically rich, structurally deft, and emotionally complex."

-- The Boston Globe

Broke-ology premiered in 2008 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and will have its New York premiere this fall at Lincoln Center. Drawing on his own Lincoln Center contacts established during the run of the hip-hop musical Clay, Rosen was able to negotiate the Rep's own production of Broke-ology to immediately follow its New York debut.

Hatley is assistant artistic director for the Rep and has recently been praised for his Rep directing debut of The Borderland. Earlier this season, he appeared in the Rep's nationally acclaimed production of The Glass Menagerie. Active in the local theatre community, Hatley wrote and directed two original shows for the 2008 Fringe Festival and is planning to participate in the 2009 Festival. He is also artistic director of Chatterbox Audio Theater, and his original work recently won a Silver Ogle Award for excellence from the American Society for Science Fiction Audio.

TBA - AN AMERICAN CLASSIC DIRECTED BY David Cromer
March 12-April 4, 2010 - Spencer Theatre

The creative and imaginative style of David Cromer, one of American theatre's most critically acclaimed directors, will return to the Rep to stage an American classic. Although the final title has yet to be selected, it is certain that Cromer will present an innovative and ground breaking new approach to one of the great masterpieces of the theatre.

Cromer directed the Rep's production of The Glass Menagerie, about which Terry Teachout, National Theatre critic for The Wall Street Theatre, wrote, "The greatest of all American plays has received a production worthy of its beauty and truth...by Kansas City Repertory Theatre, in a staging by David Cromer."

After the triumphant success of The Glass Menagerie, Cromer went on to direct a widely acclaimed New York production of Our Town, and later this year he will make his Broadway debut directing Brighton Beach Memoirs and Broadway Bound.

VENICE
April 9-May 9, 20010
Written by Matt Sax and Eric Rosen
Directed by Eric Rosen
A co-production with Center Theatre Group, Los Angeles

Matt Sax and Eric Rosen, the team that created the Rep's electrifying hip-hop musical Clay, return with a new, high voltage musical, Venice. Loosely based on Shakespeare's Othello, Venice is set in a post- apocalyptic world in the not-too-distant future. The epic story of war, love, treachery and the quest for peace turns on two brothers who must lead a city out of a terrorist war; one brother seeks peace while the other is mired in treachery and destruction. It is a powerful tale of the struggle between war and peace, bringing the theatricality of hip-hop to a large-cast musical.

"It really is kind of an opera about two brothers fighting it out," explained Rosen. "Who's going to save the city? Its big, weighty themes are told in a mix of genres including hip-hop, some R&B, and some traditional theatre music."

"Mr. Sax infuses his songs with a surprising variety of moods and tones that

stretch well beyond the braggadocio of cliché [of hip-hop]."

-- Charles Isherwood, The New York Times, about Sax's work Clay

Ticket renewals for Kansas City Repertory Theatre's 2009-10 season are now available and will go on sale to the general public in late summer. For subscription information, please contact the Rep Box Office at 816-235-2700 or visit www.kcrep.org.

Now in its 44th season, Kansas City Repertory Theatre is its region's only member of the prestigious national League of Resident Theatres (LORT) and serves as the professional theatre in residence at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC). The company produces plays and events at Spencer Theatre, its mainstage theatre on the UMKC campus, and at Copaken Stage which opened in downtown Kansas City in February 2007. The mission of Kansas City Rep is to present productions of excellence that are diverse, literate and timely, and to provide educational and outreach services for students and our community.

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