Musical Vanities World Premiere in New TheatreWorks Season; Dessa Rose, Follies Also Run | Playbill

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News Musical Vanities World Premiere in New TheatreWorks Season; Dessa Rose, Follies Also Run The world premiere of the musical Vanities will launch the upcoming TheatreWorks season which also includes Dessa Rose, The Learned Ladies of Park Avenue, Brooklyn Boy, Trying and revivals of Follies and M Butterfly.

The 37th season for the Palo Alto, California company will be performed at the Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts and at the Lucie Stern Theatre.

The line-up for 2006-2007 — with one production yet to be announced — is scheduled as follows (subject to change):

  • Vanities (June 21-July 16)
    Featuring a score by David Kirshenbaum (Summer of '42) and book by the play's author Jack Heifner, this world premiere of the new musical kicks off the season. Gordon Greenberg (The Baker's Wife - Paper Mill Playhouse) directs the 60's and 70's-set "musical scrapbook" which "chronicle[s] the lives of three small town Texas girls...from adolescence to adulthood," according to show materials. The musicalized version, developed as part of the TheatreWorks New Works Initiative, coincides with the 30th anniversary of the original play.
  • Brooklyn Boy (July 19-Aug. 13)
    Donald Margulies' drama follows "the story of an aspiring middle-aged novelist whose career suddenly skyrockets when he becomes a national best seller. As his public success grows, his personal life begins to unravel, and he must decide if grabbing what he's dreamed of means letting go of what he holds dear."


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  • M Butterfly (Aug. 23-Sept. 17)
    David Henry Hwang's 1988 Tony Award-winning play which explores the ideals of love and politics through men and women of East and West cultures. TheatreWorks founding artistic Director Robert Kelley directs Francis Jue (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Pacific Overtures) in the work is "based on the true story of a French diplomat and his love affair with a glamorous female Chinese opera star, an elusive 'butterfly' who turned out to be not only a spy, but a man."
  • Dessa Rose (October 4-29)
    Composer Stephen Flaherty and lyricist-librettist Lynn Ahrens' musical based on the novel by Sherley Anne Williams makes its West Coast debut at the TheatreWorks stage under the direction of Robert Kelley. The team behind Ragtime, Once On This Island and My Favorite Year pen this 19th century tale "about the lives of two real women living in the antebellum South" — "a rebellious slave girl and an abandoned southern belle."
  • The Learned Ladies of Park Avenue (Nov. 29-Dec. 23)
    David Grimm's free adaptation of Molière's Les Femmes savantes resets the work into the Art Deco splendor of Cole Porter's Jazz Age where "a debonair heartthrob proposes to his high-society sweetie, but soon discovers that her mother has another beau in mind, a gold-digging poet as pretentious as he is pedantic."
  • Production TBA (Jan. 17-Feb. 11, 2007)
  • Trying (March 7-April 1, 2007)
    Playwright Joanna McClelland Glass sources her own life as material for the new work, "the story of blue-blood American icon Francis Biddle, Attorney General under President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Chief Judge of the Nuremberg trials, and the fresh-faced prairie populist from Saskatchewan hired to help with his memoirs."
  • Follies (April 4-29, 2007)
    Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's musical homage to showgirls finds "a group of performers, alumni from the fictional musical revue The Weismann Follies, hold a reunion shortly before their old theatre is to be turned to rubble." TheatreWorks' Robert Kelley directs. Tickets and subscriptions to TheatreWorks' season are available through (650) 463 1960, toll free at (888) 273-3752, and online at theatreworks.org.

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