TheatreWorks Announces 2006-07 Season

TheatreWorks has announced its 2006-07 season, chuck-full of new and innovative musicals, plays, and premieres.  TheatreWorks is now in its 37th year of presenting outstanding regional theatre on the San Francisco Peninsula and was named Best Repertory Theatre in the Bay Area by prestigious San Francisco magazine. The company offers a year-round season of musicals, comedies and dramas staged in the state-of-the-art Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts and in the graceful Lucie Stern Theatre complex in Palo Alto.  The TheatreWorks 2006-07 season:

Vanities – World Premiere
June 21 to July 16, 2006 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts
A new coming-of-age musical with book by Jack Heifner and music and lyrics by David Kirshenbaum (Summer of '42).  "Chronicling the comic journey of three vivacious Texas teens from cheerleaders to sorority sisters to housewives, liberated women and beyond, this tangy tale of coming-of-age in the 60s and 70s is a musical scrapbook of an era that had to be lived to be believed," states press notes. "With a tunefully evocative score by Kirshenbaum and Heifner's hilarious adaptation of his long-running off-Broadway smash, Vanities offers a snapshot-sharp portrait of the lives, loves, disappointments, and dreams of best friends caught up in times that are a-changin'."  Starring Leslie Kritzer, Megan Hilty, and Sarah Stiles.

Brooklyn Boy
July 19 to August 13, 2006 at the Lucie Stern Theatre.
An insightful dramatic comedy by Donald Marguiles.  "This funny and warmly human Broadway hit from Pulitzer Prize winner Margulies surprises and delights with a tale of a Jewish novelist suddenly thrust into a world of best-seller acclaim and Hollywood hustle," explains press notes. "But what price success? Revisiting the rowdy neighborhoods of his youth, he makes a deeply personal discovery: you can take the boy out of Brooklyn but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the boy."  Starring Victor Talmadge and Ray Reinhardt.

M. Butterfly
August 23 to September 17, 2006 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
Tony Award-winning Best Play by David Henry Hwang.  "A brilliant and breathtaking exploration of love and politics, this audaciously imaginative drama tells the Story of a French diplomat's relationship with a glamorous Chinese opera star, an elusive 'butterfly' eventually revealed to be a spy – and a man. Sensational music and dance enhance this spectacularly theatrical revival that electrified the Bay Area and the entire country." Contains mature themes, language, and brief nudity.  Starring Francisc Jue.

Dessa Rose – West Coast Premiere
October 4 to 29, 2006 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
A stirring new musical with book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty, based on the novel Sherley Anne Williams.  "From the acclaimed creators of Ragtime comes an engaging story of pride, perseverance, and unlikely friendship forged between an abandoned southern belle and a rebellious slave girl escaping the antebellum South of the 1840s," states notes. "As a powerfully emotional score captures the rhythms and roots of 19th century America, their intertwined saga of hardship, privilege, bonding, and betrayal cries out for the independence and freedom that forever define the human spirit."

The Learned Ladies of Park Avenue – West Coast Premiere
November 29 to December 23, 2006 at the Lucie Stern Theatre.
A sparkling jazz age comedy by David Grimm, translated and freely adapted from Molière's Les Femmes Savantes.  "Amidst the art deco splendor of Cole Porter's New York, Molière's brilliant farce gets a hilarious jolt of champagne wit and jazz age dazzle. When a debonair heartthrob proposes to his high-society sweetie, he soon discovers that Mama has another beau in mind, a gold-digging poet as pompous as he is pedantic. In this enormously clever satire of upper-crust extravagance who knows whether reason, greed, or true love will prevail?"

Ambition Facing West
January 17 to February 11, 2007 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
The winner of the Elliot Newton Award for Outstanding New Play by Anthony Clarvoe.  "Dreams of freedom and fulfillment send a family ever westward throughout the past century, from turn-of-the-century Croatia to 1940s Wyoming and finally to 1980s Japan. Full of riches for the mind and heart, it is a wise and wonderfully evocative exploration of the immigrant experience, an intriguing tale of heritage and identity spread across generations of parents and children caught between holding close and letting go," explain press notes.

Trying
March 7 to April 1, 2007 at the Lucie Stern Theatre.
Ken Ruta stars in a play by Joanna McClelland Glass.  The story of "the honorable Francis Biddle, FDR's former attorney general, a blue-blood American icon in his final years. His secretary is fresh-faced Sarah Schorr, a prairie populist from Saskatchewan hired to help with his memoirs. The boss is cantankerous but charismatic, the assistant vulnerable but full of grit. And then the fun begins. Based on the playwright's own real-life experiences, this tour-de-force is a hopeful and humorous tale of friendship amidst life's most inevitable adventure: growing old."

Follies
April 4 to 29, 2007 at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts.
The Tony Award-winning musical by Stephen Sondheim with book by James Goldman.  This "astounding musical masterpiece gets an intimate new staging in this not-to-be-missed event of the season. In a long-shuttered vaudeville palace, the reunion of the cast of the once famous Follies brings together two aging couples to confront the cherished truths of their past and the clouded prospects for their future. In a haunting, sophisticated, and compelling evening of show-stopping songs and heart-wrenching revelation, the memories of innocence give way to the bittersweet facts of life."

For more information and tickets visit www.theatreworks.org or call the Mountain View Center Ticket Office 650-903-6000 open Tuesday through Saturday, noon to 6PM.

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