Repertory Theatre of St. Louis will offer the Midwest premiere of Everything's Ducky and the provocative race relations play, Spinning Into Butter, in its 2000-2001 season.
The Bill Russell-Henry Krieger musical, Everything's Ducky, was a hit in Palo Alto, CA, in early 2000, and now the Rep and Cincinnati Playhouse in the Park are teaming for a co-production helmed by original director Gip Hoppe. As previously reported by Playbill On-Line, the September November staging in St. Louis and then Cincinnati, is expected to be cast and designed with an eye toward a commercial West Coast run, a tour and perhaps an eventual New York life.
The hip, comic musical, hailed by critics and audiences on the left coast, is based on "The Ugly Duckling" fable. The St. Louis staging runs Sept. 6-Oct. 6.
Rebecca Gilman's Spinning Into Butter, which premiered in May 1999 at the Goodman Studio, exposes the cosmetic and sometimes destructive political correctness that erupts on a small Vermont college campus when an African-American student finds several racist notes pinned to his door. It runs Feb. 7-March 9, 2001.
Director Marshall W. Mason and playwright Lanford Wilson are together again for a revival of Talley's Folly, March 14-April 13, 2001. Also on the mainstage slate:
• Edward Stern directs Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's church and-state, creationism-and-evolution drama, Inherit the Wind, Oct. 11-Nov. 10.
• Steven Woolf directs Yazmina Reza's three-actor seriocomic portrait of a friendship torn up over a controversial white-on-white painting, Art, Nov. 29-Dec. 29.
• John Going directs Shaw's Major Barbara Jan. 3-Feb. 2, 2001.
For information, call (314) 968-4925 or check out the web site at www.repstl.org.
-- By Kenneth Jones
