Theatre dept. announces blockbuster season

Relive the best musical moments of the 2010-11 Wright State University theatre season. Read on to find out which shows will fill the Festival Playhouse stage in 2011-12.

 

Two Pulitzer Prizes and over 50 Tony Awards

 

The longest-running musical in Broadway history

 

The play often called the greatest work of American drama

Photo of a scene from August: Osage County featuring several actors in a fight.

Last season opened with “August: Osage County,” a groundbreaking collaboration between Wright State and the Human Race Theatre Company.

The Wright State theatre department announced a 2011-12 season that will feature five popular mainstage productions with titles audiences are sure to recognize: Death of a Salesman, Hairspray, Rent, The Merchant of Venice and The Phantom of the Opera.

The season opens in September with Arthur Miller’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, Death of a Salesman. The play tells the tragic story of a traveling salesman and the negative effects his professional failures have on his family.

Two professionals will perform the lead roles of Willy and Linda Loman: Human Race Theatre Company Resident Artist Scott Stoney and Wright State theatre faculty member Lee Merrill. Stoney returns to the Wright State stage having directed and starred in last season’s August: Osage County.

“This is a role Scott was born to play,” said W. Stuart McDowell, chair and artistic director of the Department of Theatre, Dance and Motion Pictures. “It’s going to be electric.”

Later in the fall, the department will present Hairspray. The musical comedy follows a plump, Baltimore teen in the ’60s as she strives to dance on television and fight for racial equality.

The winner of eight Tony Awards, the musical is based on the 1988 John Waters film of the same name. It was adapted into a musical film in 2007 starring John Travolta, Christopher Walken, Michelle Pfeiffer and Queen Latifah.

January will bring Jonathan Larson’s bohemian rock opera Rent to the Festival Playhouse stage. The Pulitzer Prize winner (a rarity for a musical) and recipient of four Tony Awards is not easy theatre, said McDowell. It features adult subject matter and language and deals with controversial themes such as homosexuality, drug abuse and HIV/AIDS.

Photo of a scene from August: Osage County featuring a woman talking to a police officer.

“August: Osage County” featured a cast of students and professional actors and one of the largest sets Wright State has ever used.

“It’s probably our students’ favorite musical,” said McDowell. “Its song ‘Seasons of Love’ has become the theme song of a generation. Our kids have never been more excited.”

The department will present a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice set in the modern world.

“It’s a play whose time has come again,” said McDowell, referring to recent high-profile productions such as the one staring Al Pacino.

“It’s a classic with teeth,” he said. “It deals with money and capitalism, all those things that we hear about daily on the news.”

The mainstage series will conclude with the longest-running musical Broadway has ever seen, The Phantom of the Opera.

The epic gothic thriller is based on Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel about a deformed musical genius who terrorizes a Paris opera house and the young soprano he loves.

The Dayton region is no stranger to the show; the national tour passed through town last year. Yet McDowell promises that audiences will experience a different take on the story when he directs the Wright State production. He intends to focus more on the tormented phantom.

“It will still look gorgeous,” he said. “The grandeur will still be there, but it will be darker, more psychological.”

The production will also feature one of the largest live orchestras the department has ever used.

Photo of a scene from Picnic featuring a young woman in the foreground with two women fighting behind her.

Last season also featured William Inge’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “Picnic.”

“The show has some of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best music, but that music often gets drowned out by the spectacle and the chandelier,” said McDowell. “It’s not a play about a chandelier.”

Season tickets are on sale now and can be purchased by calling the Box Office at (937) 775-2500. Subscribers can choose from a four-show package (which excludes Rent) for $64–68 or the complete five-show package for $80–85.

The announcement of next year’s season comes just after the university finishes a year of highly acclaimed productions.

“Last year we had a record number of subscriptions, over 3,000,” McDowell said. “We had people hanging from the rafters.”

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