Northern Stage Closes the Curtain on GREATER TUNA, 5/2

Northern Stage's production of the Off-Broadway smash Greater Tuna will end its run May 2nd. This madcap romp features two veteran Northern Stage actors, Scott Cote (Beauty & the Beast, Cabaret, Moon Over Buffalo) and Kevin Loreque (I Am My Own Wife, The Full Monty, CATS, The Elephant Man, Cabaret,) playing 19 characters-men, women, even Yippy the dog-in 90 minutes. With 15-second costume changes and rapid-fire humor, this promises to be an audience favorite.
  
GREATER TUNA begins at radio station OKKK in Tuna, Texas, the state's third-smallest town.  Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie offer their unusual assortment of news.  From there, the audience is introduced to Petey Fisk, the hapless Humane Society head and the crusading Rev. Snavely.  Audiences will recognize friends, neighbors, maybe even themselves, in the residents of Tuna.  They're the kind of folks you'd run into at Dan & Whit's or another local general store. 
 
About the Cast
Scott Cote joins the company after a highly successful run in the first national tour of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, in which he played the role of Goran.  He originated the role of Gus Gus in the new musical Twice Charmed: An Original Twist on the Cinderella Story for Disney Creative Entertainment, directed by Joe Calarco.  His Northern Stage appearances include Lefou in Beauty and the Beast, Howard in Moon Over Buffalo and Ernst Ludwig in Cabaret.  He also performed multiple memorable roles in Project Playwright performances of student plays.  Other regional roles include Pseudolus in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, The Baker in Into the Woods, CosMo Brown in Singin' in the Rain, and Moonface Martin in Anything Goes.

Kevin Loreque, an Ovation Award nominee (Pirelli in Sweeney Todd) and a Drama-Logue Award winner (Lies and Legends) has garnered a strong following at Northern Stage with roles ranging from the comic Malcolm in The Full Monty to the seductive Emcee in Cabaret, including a powerful performance in The Elephant Man and another multiple-character success in I Am My Own Wife (which he also performed in Edinburgh, Scotland and Harare, Zimbabwe).  He studied acting at the prestigious Beverly Hills Playhouse, performed in the Broadway National Tour of CATS as Rum Tum Tugger, and portrayed George Cohan in the World Premiere of Yankee Doodle Dandy.  His film and television credits include The Birdcage, Virtuosity with Russell Crowe and Saved By the Bell.
 
About the Director
Brooke Wetzel Ciardelli is the founding artistic director of Northern Stage. In her career, Brooke has directed over 60 productions and is a proud member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society.  

As a director, she has worked on a number of Arthur Miller plays, including Resurrection Blues with the playwright himself in residence, and an award-winning production of All My Sons.  She has directed Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and worked with playwright Sonja Linden on the American Premiere of The Strange Passenger.  Brooke has also directed regional premieres of Wit, The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Pride's Crossing and No Orchids For Miss Blandish, as well as a significant number of large-scale musicals.

As a creator, Brooke has adapted a number of classical pieces for the stage.  In 1997 her adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, The "O" Myths - "A most delightful and refreshing original theater piece based on this ancient masterpiece" - was performed at Dartmouth College as the basis of an international exchange between Dartmouth students and actors from New York, Zimbabwe, Mexico and Romania.  Her adaptation The Shrew Tamer (a coupling of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew and John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed) was reviewed as "a delicious new comedy," and Ed Siegel of the Boston Globe wrote, "Ciardelli has fashioned a play of significant historical interest."  She is currently working on a stage adaptation of Boccaccio's Decameron for international production and developing a musical based on the life of Anastasia Romanov.
Brooke has a great interest in creating collaborative partnerships with International Artists and is currently working with Giles Ramsay (www.gilesramsay.co.uk) and his U.K.-based company Developing Artists (www.developingartist.co.uk).  Through their relationship, she has worked with actors from Zimbabwe, Mexico and England, as well as touring, as co-director, with I Am My Own Wife (www.nswife.com), starring Kevin Loreque, to Harare, Zimbabwe and Edinburgh, Scotland.  In 2009, she will continue her relationships with Zimbabwean theater artists, students from Durham University, England and new projects with Palestine, Israel and Macedonia both in country and the U.S.

Brooke received her Bachelor of Arts degree from Sarah Lawrence College, with a concentration in directing; worked at The Williamstown Theater Festival and Broadway general management/producer's office of Gatchell & Neufeld; and currently lives in Norwich, Vermont.
 
About the Playwrights
Jaston Williams, from Crosbyton, Texas, is co-author and co-star of the four "Greater Tuna" plays and has been creating the citizens of Tuna for the last 22 years.  For several years, Williams toured in Larry Shue's The Foreigner, for which he received a Helen Hayes Award nomination for Best Actor.  He performed in The Fantasticks at Washington's Ford's Theatre and directed the musical Bad Girls Upset By The Truth at Atlanta's ALLIANCE THEATRE.  He received the Texas Governors Award for Outstanding Contribution to the Arts by a Native Texan and has performed at the White House on three occasions.  In his hometown of Austin, Texas, Williams has appeared at the State Theatre in Eugene Ionesco's The Chairs and at Zachary Scott Theatre in Jay Presson Allen's Tru, for which he received the Austin Critics Table Award for Best Actor in a drama.  He most recently appeared at Zachary Scott Theatre in The Laramie Project.  His play, Romeo and Thorazine, workshopped at Zachary Scott Theater in November 2001.  He workshopped his autobiographical one-man show I'm Not Lying to critical acclaim at Austin's State Theatre Of Texas and returned it there for a full production in February 2004.  Recent works include Morning Stars and A Little Iffy, and his latest autobiographical play Cowboy Noises premiered in Austin in February 2008 to critical acclaim.

Joe Sears, a native of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, has been touring extensively with the Tuna plays since 1981.  His sixth tour of A Tuna Christmas included his Broadway debut, for which he received a 1995 Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play.  Sears has been acting professionally for the past 30 years.  His credits include a season with Theatre Works USA in New York, summer stock, outdoor drama, television and eight Shakespeare plays.  Among his many roles are Bottom and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the Doctor in Three Sisters.  He appeared with Fannie Flagg in The Foreigner.  He made his movie debut with Tommy Lee Jones and Matt Damon in The Good Old Boys.  Sears is the playwright for the Cherokee Nation's outdoor drama Trail of Tears, which runs during the summer months in Tahlequah, OK.  He was awarded the "Theatre LA Ovation Award" for Best Actor 1999.  He recently completed the Libretto (along with Mr. Williams) for the new comic opera Ochelata's Wedding, commissioned by the OK Mozart International Music Festival.  He and Austin-Nashville songwriter Kimmie Rhodes are now working on a new musical entitled Doin' God's Chores, an Austin workshop production.  Mr. Sears also owns and operates Cody Stage, a summer stock theatre company in Cody, WY.
 
Ed Howard is co-author of Greater Tuna, A Tuna Christmas, Red, White and Tuna, Tuna Does Vegas, Splendora, The Tempest Tossed, a musical with music by Dennis West, and Coming Attractions, based on the novel Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man by Fannie Flagg.  Off-Broadway, he has directed Greater Tuna and Laughing Stock, written by Romulus Linney and starring Frances Sternhagen, which was selected as one of the ten best plays of 1984 by Time Magazine.  On Broadway, he directed A Tuna Christmas, and he directed the national tours of all the Tuna plays and All The Way From Magnolia Springs.
 
About the Play
The show began as a simple party skit based on a political cartoon more than 20 years ago in Austin, Texas.  Sears and Williams had met in 1973 at the First Repertory Company of San Antonio, at auditions for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream; in 1980, along with Howard and others, they created the theater company Xenia III Productions in Austin, beginning with a musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  Private funding for the theater disappeared, and the company dissolved. In 1981, asked to provide entertainment for a friend's party, Sears and Williams riffed on the idea of small-town radio station WOKKK.  The reaction inspired them to create a full-length play based on the characters from Tuna, improvising into a tape recorder.  Howard collaborated on the script, directed, and helped fund the first production in 1981 (in the Trans/Act Theatre, which now houses a Hard Rock Café).

The play was such a success that a critic from Variety stopped in, and the publicity led to runs in, among other places, San Francisco, Hartford and New York, including over a year at the Off-Broadway Circle in the Square Theatre.  This successful New York run lead to an HBO Special produced by Norman Lear.  By 1985, Greater Tuna was the most produced play in the United States.  Meanwhile, Sears and Williams were continuing their tours.
 
Greater Tuna crossed the Atlantic in 1988 at Scotland's Edinburgh International Arts Festival.  The Marines Memorial Theatre in San Francisco began a local production which ran continuously for a record-breaking seven years.  They performed at the White House in 1990 and 1991 upon the invitation of President and Mrs. George H.W. Bush.
 
Because of the response to Greater Tuna, Williams, Sears and Howard created A Tuna Christmas.  In December of 1994, A Tuna Christmas ran on Broadway in 1994.  Joe Sears earned a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor in a Play.  The three wrote Red, White and Tuna, which toured nationally; their most recent effort, Tuna Does Vegas, recently completed a regional tour.
 
The team received Helen Hayes Award nominations for A Tuna Christmas and Red, White And Tuna, as well as the San Francisco Bay Area Critics Award for Greater Tuna and the L.A. Dramalogue Award for Greater Tuna and A Tuna Christmas.  A Tuna Christmas was published in Best Plays of 1995.
 
(Much of the information here comes from the Greater Tuna Web site (www.greatertuna.com) and "The Secret History of Tuna" by Robert Faires in the Austin Chronicle, April 12, 2002.)  
About Northern StageNorthern Stage now stands as one of the most prestigious and fastest-growing regional theaters in New England.  Founding Artistic Director Brooke Ciardelli brought the company to the Briggs Opera House in 1997; since then, Northern Stage has offered over 85 productions, including World Premieres such as The Shrew Tamer, Ovid: Tales of Myth & Magic and A Christmas Carol: The Musical.  Other highlights include a staged reading of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Patrick Stewart and Lisa Harrow and a reading of Resurrection Blues, with the playwright, Pulitzer Prize winner Arthur Miller, in attendance.  The company has twice been honored with Moss Hart Awards for Excellence in Theater for Best Professional Production from the New England Theatre Conference, for productions of To Kill A Mockingbird (1999) and Les Misérables (2008), as well as an Addison Award for The Shrew Tamer (2004).

Community support has enabled the company to sell over 35,000 tickets in downtown White River Junction in the last year to enjoy entertaining and thought-provoking professional theater and theater education here at the crossroads of northern New England.  They have also reached out to offer residencies and workshops at over a dozen area schools; and initiated "Project Playwright," a literacy program for fifth and sixth graders.

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