Kander and Ebb's Skin of Our Teeth-Based Musical Will Play Westport in 2007
By Robert Simonson
15 Aug 2006
The Westport Country Playhouse will produce John Kander and Fred Ebb's Thornton Wilder-inspired musical All About Us during its 2007 season.
The show, based on Wilder's play The Skin of Our Teeth, has been knocking about for several years and has a long history. It received its world premiere at the Signature Theatre Company in Arlington, VA, in 1999 as Over and Over. It has since gone through several workshops and title changes. (It was once called, simply, Skin of Our Teeth). The most recent reported workshop was in June 2005 at the McCarter Theatre Center's Berlind Rehearsal Room in Princeton, NJ. Karen Ziemba was featured.
Westport's Tazewell Thompson officially announced the 2007 All About Us plan (and other season details) Aug. 15.
The book is by Joseph Stein, who penned the script for Fiddler on the Roof. Gabriel Barre will direct. It will run April 10- 28, 2007.
Playbill.com first reported Westport's intentions to stage the show on June 22.
Stein previously told Playbill.com, "The Virginia version was — I hate to use the word 'fiasco' — but I think it was badly mishandled. Characters were added which I felt were unnecessary. It just didn't work properly, but we saw what was wrong, and I think we fixed it. We based it on a damn good play. I made a lot of changes, and the third act of the play practically doesn't exist in the musical. Basically, the line of the play, we have kept. And the three major characters we have kept intact. We made the changes that will improve it for a contemporary audience. It has a much more contemporary feel than the play."
Sabina is the maid and narrator in the 1942 play about human resilience, in which the Antrobus family survives disasters and dramatic changes of Biblical proportions.
Ebb died on Sept. 11, 2004. Another late-career work of his and Kander's, Curtains, recently received a world premiere at the Ahmanson Theatre in L.A. It is expected on Broadway this coming season.
Also part of the Westport 2007 line-up is a new production of the late Wendy Wasserstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Heidi Chronicles, running May 31 through June 16, 2007, with Tazewell Thompson directing; a world premiere of Westport playwright-in-residence David Wiltse's Sedition, about "a man whose conscience during World War I forced him to stand up in defense of our freedom of speech—and the price he paid for his courage," playing Aug. 23-Sept. 8, 2007; and four more plays to be announced.
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