Tony, Katrina and the Tony Awards

Actor Tony Shalhoub and the musical in which he currently stars--The Band's Visit--took the Tony Awards by storm last night, with ten wins overall, including awards for leading actor Shalhoub, leading actress Katrina Lenk, featured actor Ari'el Stachel and director David Cromer, as well as Itamar Moses' book, David Yazbek's score, Jamshied Sharifi's orchestrations, Tyler Micoleau's lighting design and Kai Harada's sound design. And, of course, Best Musical.

The pieces performed from nominated musicals didn't really showcase anything too exciting, although Lenk was lovely singing "Omar Sharif" from The Band's Visit, offering a hint of the show's power, and Hailey Kilgore and the cast of Once on This Island showed why they won Best Revival of a Musical. I also enjoyed the funny and fizzy performance from Gavin Lee and some underwater creatures from SpongeBob Squarepants: The Musical.

On the play side, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child took home six Tony statuettes, winning Best Play (even though playwright Jack Thorne was shut out at the microphone), Best Direction of a Play for John Tiffany, as well as scenic, lighting, sound and costume design awards. Andrew Garfield and Nathan Lane were both honored for their performances in the new millennial production of Angels in America,which also won Best Revival of a Play. And living legends Glenda Jackson and Laurie Metcalf won for their two-thirds of Three Tall Women.

Hosts Sara Bareilles and Josh Groban provided an amiable and entertaining presence throughout and I'd be happy to see them back in those positions in future years. Other highlights included a performance of "Seasons of Love" from the musical Rent by students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Bruce Springsteen with a heartfelt, if mostly spoken performance at the piano, and the divine disco stylings of "Last Dance" from the Donna Summer musical.

Here's how the 2018 Tony Awards unfolded:

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE IN A PLAY
Andrew Garfield, Angels in America

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A FEATURED ROLE IN A PLAY
Laurie Metcalf, Three Tall Women

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A FEATURED ROLE IN A MUSICAL
Lindsay Mendez, Carousel

BEST BOOK OF A MUSICAL
Itamar Moses, The Band’s Visit

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A FEATURED ROLE IN A PLAY
Nathan Lane, Angels in America

BEST COSTUME DESIGN OF A MUSICAL
Catherine Zuber, My Fair Lady

COSTUME DESIGN OF A PLAY
Katrina Lindsay, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A FEATURED ROLE IN A MUSICAL
Ari’el Stachel, The Band’s Visit

BEST LIGHTING DESIGN OF A MUSICAL
Tyler Micoleau, The Band’s Visit

BEST LIGHTING DESIGN OF A PLAY
Neil Austin, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE IN A PLAY
Glenda Jackson, Three Tall Women

BEST DIRECTION OF A MUSICAL
David Cromer, The Band’s Visit

BEST DIRECTION OF A PLAY
John Tiffany, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

BEST PLAY
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two, by Jack Thorne


BEST SOUND DESIGN OF A PLAY
Kai Harada, The Band’s Visit

BEST SOUND DESIGN OF A MUSICAL
Gareth Fry, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

BEST REVIVAL OF A PLAY
Angels in America, by Tony Kushner

BEST SCENIC DESIGN OF A MUSICAL
David Zinn, SpongeBob Squarepants: The Musical

BEST SCENIC DESIGN OF A PLAY
Christine Jones,Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Parts One and Two

BEST ORCHESTRATIONS
Jamshied Sharifi, The Band’s Visit

BEST CHOREOGRAPHY
Justin Peck, Carousel

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
David Yazbek, The Band’s Visit

BEST REVIVAL OF A MUSICAL
Once on This Island

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE IN A MUSICAL
Tony Shalhoub, The Band’s Visit

BEST PERFORMANCE BY AN ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE IN A MUSICAL
Katrina Lenk, The Band’s Visit

BEST MUSICAL
The Band’s Visit

NT Live and PERESTROIKA

Tony Kushner subtitled his Angels in America "a gay fantasia on national themes." The nation he was referring to was, of course, the United States of America, which is referred to constantly throughout both plays and gets that "America" reference in the title, as well. After seeing both parts of Britain's National Theatre Live cinema presentation of Angels in America, I think I've centered on my biggest problem with this particular take on Kushner's masterpiece. It's just not American enough.

Nathan Lane emerges as a powerhouse in both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika, perhaps because he isn't struggling to find that essential Americanism under Roy Cohn's skin. He's got it. It's to Russell Tovey's and Andrew Garfield's credit that they are better attuned to it, too, and that they both turn in excellent, well thought-out and well executed performances.

As Prior Walter, the man in the center of the action, the prophet, the victim, the one with "gay fantasia" swirling around him, Garfield has the showier role and he makes the most of it. I still think he's channeling Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard too much for his own good, and he looks like he could be Anne Hathaway's twin brother (Anne and Andrew in Twelfth Night, anyone?) but he does jump into Prior's pajamas with both feet, so kudos there.

But I think Russell Tovey is even better as Joe Pitt, the self-loathing gay Mormon lawyer who just can't seem to make his life work. In Part One, Joe is hobnobbing with powerbrokers like Lane's Cohn, imagining himself as a player in Reagan's America. In Part Two, after the explosions of Millennium Approaches, Joe has come hard up against his lies and deception. He's a little panicked and a lot off-balance as he tries to find some sense of who he is. Tovey navigates all that beautifully, with an inner glow that makes it understandable that someone like Roy Cohn would want him on his team, that Louis would be attracted to him, even knowing his politics, that Prior would be devastated to realize THIS is his ex-lover's new beau, that Harper would have married him in the first place. Suddenly the pieces fit.

I can't say that the pieces fit for Susan Brown as Hannah Pitt or Amanda Lawrence as the Angel, however. Brown is better as the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik and her Ethel Rosenberg is good enough in the excellent Kaddish scene, but her Mother Pitt never seems like an American for even a minute. Hannah may be plain-spoken and stiff of spine, but she is also naive in some ways, unknowing instead of uncaring. Brown's Hannah is all rough edges and hard knocks with no layers of humanity underneath. And she can't fully suppress her British enunciation. Lawrence also struggles with the American accents, and she never gets past that problem far enough to sink into her characters. She is undermined by her costumes, as well, which don't take her from the glorious, androgynous white vision carved from Greek marble described in Kushner's Millennium script to the battling black harpy of Perestroika, but leave her as a hard-luck little insect Angel, scraggly and unkempt, throughout. Her version of a Mormon mother who steps out of a diorama is even less successful, blunting the impact of Kushner's "jagged thumbnail" speech and dimming the play's messages about change and suffering.

Those messages are hard to catch throughout Marianne Elliott's production. If this Millennium takes its time to breathe as it sets things up, the companion Perestroika seems to wander and unravel. For a play that debates the wisdom of standing still versus moving ahead, there just isn't enough forward momentum.

Part of that lies in the direction of individual scenes and part of it comes from the murky-after-midnight scenic design, which remains mystifying. Yes, we've lost the revolving set pieces edged in neon (for the most part, anyway) but the new vast and impersonal space with an arching dome -- something like the ceiling inside an old movie palace -- is just as perplexing. I enjoyed the levels and lifts and some of the stage pictures created, like Prior's ladder to heaven, Roy slipping out of his death bed and onto a new plane, and Harper trying to hang on as her scenery is swept away, but in general, the vast expanse swallows up the action. And this stingy version of the Bethesda Fountain, the location for the final scene of the play, is underwhelming at best.

Kushner's play is so beautiful and his characters so strong that it pulls you in even in the places that this particular production falters. There is, after all, some new wisdom to learn from every new Angels in America. This time out, I was struck by a particular speech delivered by Prior:

"Then I'm crazy... The whole world is, why not me?"  As he tells us, every morning he wakes up and it takes him "long minutes to remember...that this is real, it isn't just an impossible, terrible dream."

What could be more timely, more right now than that?

NT Live and MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

The first half of Britain's National Theatre's take on Tony Kushner's blistering and beautiful Angels in America arrived in cinemas last week, looking and sounding just as timely and affecting as ever. The depth of Kushner's language may be what hits you first, but it's the humanity of his complex, imperfect characters that keeps the Angels fire burning throughout Part One: Millennium Approaches.

This production, directed by Marianne Elliott, has been much buzzed about, partly because of its casting. With Nathan Lane playing Kushner's version of closeted gay powerbroker/Joe McCarthy acolyte/friend of Trump/poisonous toad Roy Cohn and Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter, a sweet gay man with AIDS at the beginning of the epidemic, there was bound to be notice taken. Both Lane and Garfield are turning in terrific performances, making it clear they were cast for more than just their star-power.

Lane is not the cuddly musical-comedy star you may expect from The Producers or La Cage aux Folles, although the jokes about the latter show at the beginning of Millennium Approaches do take on added amusement coming from him. But as the play proceeds, he starts biting off chunks of Roy Cohn and spitting them out, not afraid to go dark and disturbing when he needs to. He also works beautifully with Russell Tovey, who is really stellar as Joe Pitt, the resolute, married Mormon lawyer who is fighting his attraction to men and unsure about almost everything in his life. Joe can be a difficult character to communicate, given all that repression. But Tovey takes him to a much more vital place. He may be tortured and wrong-headed, but this Joe is alive and searching. He may also be the best Joe I've seen, and with Lane half of the best Roy/Joe combination.

Garfield's Prior is (and should be) the opposite of Joe's turned-in persona. At the outset, Garfield seems to be going for drama queen gusto with his Norma Desmond take on Prior, but his scenes with James McArdle as Louis, Prior's boyfriend who can't handle illness or death, put him in the proper context to break your heart. Garfield has some really fine moments when life (and the fantasia part of Kushner's "gay fantasia on national themes") hit him where it hurts, creating some of Millennium's most powerful scenes.

I also enjoyed Denise Gough, whose Harper Pitt is fragile and strange, but also intelligent, as she negotiates her messed-up marriage and the "threshold of revelation" that connects her to Prior as it gives her some unpleasant truths about her husband. And Nathan Stewart-Jarrett is on target as Prior's ex-drag-queen friend Belize, although I'm hoping he is a little more memorable in Part Two when Belize's role grows.

I was less fond of McArdle's portrayal of Louis, which was interesting if not fully satisfying. He sounds as if he's channeling Gene Wilder to get an American Jewish mood, but... This Louis is really not Jewish at all. He even mispronounces "anti-Semitic." And that's a problem, given that Kushner opens the play with a rabbi who is telling us that Louis's Judaism is bred in the bone. Still, McArdle's killer speech about politics and race shows he can handle the density of the language and still make it seem spontaneous, which is key.

The final two actors in the ensemble -- Susan Brown and Amanda Lawrence, who both play multiple roles -- are less than impressive. Brown is fine as the rabbi, but I didn't care for her stiff and chilly take on Hannah Pitt or the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, and Lawrence struggles to sound American throughout, especially when playing a homeless woman slurping soup in the Bronx. Her entrance as the Angel, which is supposed to be "very Steven Spielberg" and knock-your-socks-off theatrical, is definitely underwhelming, although that seems mostly due to director Elliott's choice to go with hoisting her Angel on the backs of black-clad crew members instead of flying her in through the ceiling and smashing some plaster. This is a bit too minimal and pedestrian.

Ian MacNeil's scenic design and Paule Constable's lighting are also minimalist, focusing on three separate spaces where industrial gray flats edged in neon revolve to carry actors in and out. It's got the look of an Edward Hopper painting now and again, but it's awfully murky, at least on screen, and neither Hopper nor a dystopic Big Brother wasteland suits the material all that well. It's not clear whether the cinematic work needed to transport the action from the National's Lyttleton space to movie theaters is at fault or whether it looked this vast and gray on stage, too, but it's distancing. I have hopes that will improve for Perestroika, too.

In any event, Tony Kushner's masterpiece is strong enough to overcome a few missteps. Or an army of missteps, for that matter. Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika can't come soon enough. It will be here -- in cinemas nationwide -- Thursday, July 27 at 7 pm.

ANGELS IN AMERICA, From National Theatre Live in London to Movie Screens

When you see a play or musical you really love, your reaction may be that you never want to see another production of it, that that one was perfect and you don't want to impose any new production over your memories of the perfect one. Or you may want to see as many different productions of that show as possible. Follies? Arcadia? I'll go see either of them anywhere I can manage. Good, bad or indifferent, there is no production of those shows I will not try.

Angels in America, Tony Kushner's two-part "gay fantasia on national themes" that sweeps together Mormons, Jews, Reagan Republicans and the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, falls into that category. I saw both parts -- Millennium Approaches and Perestroika -- on stage in New York and in Chicago in the early 90s. The Broadway and touring productions were very different, but each was deeply personal, deeply political, heartbreaking and fabulous in its own way. I also loved the small-but-mighty Angels directed by Steven M. Keen for Urbana's tiny Station Theater. And the all-star version version on HBO. Yes, I've struggled through several college productions that didn't send me and found myself unable to get to farther-flung Angels that were very warmly received.

This month, we all have the chance to meet another Angels when Fathom Events and National Theatre Live bring the current London production from the National's Lyttelton Theatre, directed by Marianne Elliott, with Nathan Lane as Roy Cohn and Andrew Garfield as Prior Walter, to movie theater screens all over Great Britain and the United States. Part One: Millennium Approaches, airs this Thursday, July 20, with Part Two: Perestroika the following Thursday.

You can find a theater near you at this link. There's nothing in Bloomington-Normal, but in the just-about-50-mile range, you can find the Willow Knolls 14 in Peoria or the Savoy 16 outside Champaign-Urbana. Both theaters are showing both parts of Angels in America at 7 pm on their respective Thursdays and you can purchase tickets now.

If you'd like to read more about Angels in America at the National or see videos, interviews and photos, check out this page at the National Theatre website.

Angels in America: PERESTROIKA at ISU Starting Thursday

When the first half of Tony Kushner's Angels in America opus, the Millennium Approaches half, was unveiled to audiences in 1992 (in Los Angeles) and 1993 (on Broadway), audiences were stunned. The sweeping nature of the play, covering the past, the present, the future, the nature of change and staying the same, as well as all kinds of issues related to AIDS, homosexuality, Mormons, Jews, Marxism, Ronald Reagan Republicans, Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy, Ethel Rosenberg, and of course, angels, kept people on the edge of their seats for the entire three hours it took to tell the first half of Kushner's story.

At the end of Millennium Approaches, by the time the character of Prior Walter utters the memorable line, "Very Stephen Spielberg" when an angel crashes through his ceiling, audiences were also desperate to find out what happened to WASPy Prior, who had been diagnosed with AIDS; Louis, the conflicted Jewish boyfriend who had deserted Prior when he became ill; Belize, a friend of Prior's who had been a drag queen but was now a nurse; a closeted Mormon Republican named Joe Pitt who was having trouble suppressing the fact that he was gay; Joe's unhappy wife, pill-popping Harper; Joe's hard-edged mother, Hannah, who came from Salt Lake City to find him; and Roy Cohn, the epitome of evil, a character based on the real-life lawyer and Washington power broker who'd sent the Rosenbergs to the chair and sat at the right hand of Senator Joe McCarthy.

Kushner's vision was huge, funny, fantastic, sad and true, all at once, what with that Angel crashing through the ceiling, a "threshold of revelation" where two strangers' reality overlapped in their dreams; a flaming Hebrew letter that appeared out of nowhere in a hospital room, and an imaginary travel agent named Mr. Lies who took one of the characters to Antarctica.

Angels in America Part II: Perestroika appeared on Broadway about six months after Millennium Approaches, and Kushner was still writing it, trimming it, polishing it till the last minute. This one was even bigger, coming in at four hours. Yes, that's right -- if you wanted the whole Angels story, back-to-back, it was going to take you seven hours. And the scope got even bigger, with Heaven and Hell and a whole phalanx of Angels now in the mix.

It's Perestroika that David Ian Lee is directing for Illinois State University in the intimate space at Centennial West 207, with performances scheduled for November 7, 8, 12, 13, 14, 15, and 16. Will it run four hours? Will we see Roy Cohn in Hell? Will Prior visit Heaven and see Louis's grandmother? Those are some of the variables involved in Tony Kushner's different revisions, along with whether Joe Pitt will go FFN when he strips off his Mormon temple garments, whether there will be projections to tell us the titles of the individual sections of the play, what kind of music or underscoring will be used, and how this production envisions the Perestroika landscape. Will it be a police-taped post-Apocalyptic mess? Look like the basement of the Smithsonian? Or like a giant shipwreck? I've seen all three, as well as one with a big ol' Bethesda Fountain front and center throughout the play and one that sent us to a giant disco inferno.

I have to think Lee's Perestroika will be simply staged, just given the venue. There's no room for rafters full of abandoned furniture or a giant ship's mast and sails crashed on the stage. But that is the beauty of Angels in America. It can be reshaped and reimagined and still come off just as stunning. It's an amazing piece of work.

For ISU, Nick Spindler will play Prior Walter, with Ross Kugman as Louis Ironson, Bryson Thomas as Belize, David Fisch as Joe Pitt, Cydney Moody as Harper Pitt, Kelsey Bunner as Hannah Pitt, Joe Faifer as Roy Cohn, and Emma Dreher as the Angel. Most of them will play other roles, as well, to fill in a character roster that includes the World's Oldest Living Bolshevik, mannequins in a tableau at the Mormon Visitors Center, and the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg. This is complex, difficult work for college-age actors, but also the kind of material they won't get a chance to work with very often.

If you're an actor and you get a chance to take a waltz with Angels in America, no matter when or where, I'm thinking you take it.

Look Out! November Crashes into Theaters with Every Possible Option

Time to binge on the last of the Halloween candy and toss the pumpkins away. November is here!

Although it's easy to get fussy about November as the days get shorter and the weather takes on a certain chill, there's also a lot to keep you occupied and away from sad songs like "November Rain," "November Blue," and the one where November has tied Tom Waits to an old dead tree. Take a deep breath, put away the November songs, and jump into...Thanksgiving! Pie! Lots and lots of pie!

As well as dancing Irish sisters, David Sedaris, a crazy acting class at Heartland, Monty Python at Community Players, Angels descending from on high, and Noel Coward at IWU...

And founding father Alexander Hamilton, he of the ten-dollar bill, on stage at Illinois Wesleyan's E. Melba Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre. In Tim Slover's Treasure, directed by Michael Cotey, Hamilton is caught in a web of ambition, greed, carelessness, righteousness, honor and betrayal. What happens when a brilliant man with the country's best interests at heart finds himself the victim of his own baser instincts? Politics as usual, that's what. You'll find Treasure's themes of individualism vs. federalism and entrenched wealth vs. opportunity very, very current. Treasure has only two more performances, tonight and tomorrow at 8 pm.

Meanwhile, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles of yesteryear appear at the Art Theater Co-op in Champaign. What's not to love about turtles who act like human teenagers, trained by a sewer rat to fight crime? They were all the rage in comic books and cartoons of the 80s, and they got a bunch of different movies, including the one from 1990 being screened at the Art. Not only is the Art offering this mutant classic movie on November 1, 2, 3 and 7, but they're also selling pizza at the Friday and Saturday shows. Cowabunga!

Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel's evocative memory play about an Irish family in the 1930s, opens tonight at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts. ISU professor Lori Adams directs this sweet, sad play about the Mundy sisters, played by and Natalie Blackman, Faith Servant, Fiona Stephens, Jaimie Taylor and Elsa Torner, with Arif Yampolsky as their brother Jack, and Robert Johnson as our narrator, who steps back into his childhood to tell this story.

University of Illinois professor Henson Keys appears the aging magician Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest, which continues through November 3 at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Urbana. Robert G. Anderson directs this very different take on the The Tempest, which focuses on Prospero's exploitation of the island on which he has found himself marooned, bringing in "the ecological implications of theatre making while working to implement sustainable practices." This production has been presented in association with the Department of Landscape Architecture and the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois.

David Sedaris brings his brand of dry wit and wry humor to the Bloomington Center for the Performing Arts on November 6, including readings from "Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls," his newest collection of essays, and a book signing. The next night, the BCPA hosts Dr. John, that master of voodoo-meets-R&B-meets-funktastic-piano who wrote "Right Place Wrong Time," won six Grammies, and made the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. That's a very interesting one-two punch for November 6 and 7.

Annie Baker's Circle Mirror Transformation, a luminous and lovely play about four very different people who take an Adult Drama class at a small community center in Vermont, opens with a special pay-what-you-can preview on Thursday, November 7. Illinois State University professor Cyndee Brown directs Circle Mirror for Heartland with a cast that includes Cathy Sutliff as Marty, the teacher of the class, and Julia Besch, Dean Brown, Cristen Monson and Aaron Thomas as her students. You will see hula hooping, counting, the personification of trees, confessions and, yes, transformation on stage before you, with performances November 7-9, 14-17 and 21-24. Check out showtimes here or reservation information here.

Community Players opens Monty Python's Spamalot, the stage musical lovingly ripped off from the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, on their stage with a preview on November 7 and regular performances November 8-10, 14-17 and 21-24. Chris Terven leads the cast as King Arthur, with John Bowen as Sir Lancelot, Spencer Powell as Sir Galahad, Charles Boudreaux as Sir Bedevere and Sharon Russell as The Lady of the Lake. Marcia Weiss directs this epic farce, which manages to pack in all the familiar Python bits like the French taunter and the Knight of Ni (both played by Dave Krostal) as well as a lot of spoofing at the expense of the Great White Way. Click here for all the details about Community Players' production.

And the theatrical offerings on that very popular weekend are not over yet! MFA director David Ian Lee brings part II, the Perestroika half of Tony Kushner's masterpiece Angels in America, to Centennial West 207 that very same weekend. This "gay fantasia on national themes" looks at America in the 80s, when the AIDS crisis was just beginning, Ronald Reagan was in the White House, evil lawyer Roy Cohn was straddling the former and the latter, and a new century was about to crack wide open. Both Millennium Approaches and Perestroika were produced in ISU's Westhoff Theatre (the old Westhoff Theatre), with Patrick O'Gara directing the shows as part of the 1998-99 and 1999-2000 seasons. I have to think Lee will have a different take than O'Gara did, and it will be intriguing to see Perestroika by itself. I've seen Millennium as a stand-alone before (at the University of Illinois) and I had to wait a year between Millennium and Perestroika on Broadway, but otherwise... I've always seen them performed together. This will not be my first black box Angels, however. The Station Theater in Urbana did a bang-up job with both pieces, under the direction of Steven M. Keen, way back in 1996.

If you thought that was all the theater that could possibly open on November 7, you would be wrong. Clybourne Park, Bruce Norris's take on Lorraine Hansberry's classic A Raisin in the Sun, opens in the Studio Theatre at Krannert Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Illinois that very same weekend. Clybourne Park has emerged as one of the hottest plays of the past few years, earning Norris a Pulitzer and a Broadway run whose cast included U of I theatre alums Crystal Dickinson and Brandon Dirden. The U of I production is directed by Lisa Gaye Dixon and features Akua Sarhen in the role Dickinson played, and Preston “Wigasi” Brant in the role Dirden understudied.

Urbana's Station Theatre opens Come Back Little Sheba on November 7, as well, with performances until the 23rd, while across town Parkland College in Champaign goes with November 14 to start its production of Jon Jory's stage adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Phew! A show not starting on the 7th!

November is a little late for Hay Fever, but Noel Coward's droll comedy about a theatre family in the 1920s taking its act to the country is a welcome sight well past the allergy season. Illinois Wesleyan professor Nancy Loitz will direct Hay Fever for McPherson Theatre from the 19th through the 24th, with 8 pm performances on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, and a Saturday matinee at 2 on November 24.

I would be remiss if I did not mention the Fred Astaire appearance at the Normal Theater, with Holiday Inn, a lesser effort that stars Bing Crosby as a man who opens a hotel/nightclub in Vermont that's only open on holidays. It's a precursor of sorts to White Christmas, what with the Irving Berlin score that includes the song "White Christmas," although this one is black and white and has some creepy blackface stuff for Abraham Lincoln's birthday. Fred plays Bing's ex-partner, a dancer named Ted Hanover who keeps getting into romantic triangles with singer Bing. Holiday Inn plays the big screen at the Normal Theater from November 21 to 24, followed by another holiday classic, Miracle on 34th Street, from November 28 to 30.

ISU Theatre and Dance Ready to Spring Forward into 2013-14

Illinois State University's School of Theatre and Dance has announced the 2013-14 season. That means we now know what shows will be keeping ISU's directors, designers and actors busy from next fall through spring 2014.

First on the list is the angst-rock musical Spring Awakening, with music composed by Duncan Sheik and book and lyrics by Steven Sater, scheduled for performances in ISU's Center for the Performing Arts. The musical is based on an 1891 play by German author Frank Wedekind which ISU produced as part of the 2007-08 season. The Sheik/Sater musical stays fairly close to Wedekind's plot, about the dangers looming for German turn-of-the-century teenagers with raging hormones whose parents purposely keep them ignorant about sex, sexuality, and the consequences of both. Glee star Lea Michele got her big break in the Off-Broadway and Broadway productions of the show in 2006, while her costars Jonathan Groff (also in Glee and then Boss as well as numerous stage roles) and John Gallagher, Jr. (recently of The Newsroom on HBO) took home two of the show's eight Tony Awards. For ISU, MFA director Matthew Scott Campbell will take the reins of Spring Awakening.

Dancing at Lughnasa at the Old Vic

Also slated for the CPA is Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa, a memory play about five Irish sisters who live in the fictional town of Ballybeg in 1936. Our narrator, the son of one of the sisters, remembers a summer when he was seven, when each of the sisters yearned for something more, even though it would ultimately end in dashed dreams for each of them. Dancing at Lughnasa has been well performed regionally and since it opened at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1990, with a Broadway run and numerous Irish and English productions, including a 2009 London production with real-life sisters Niamh, Sinéad and Sorcha Cusack. There was even a movie version starring Meryl Streep as oldest sister Kate in 1998. Fresh off her Off-Broadway triumph with Falling, Lori Adams, ISU's Head of Acting, will direct.

The only fall show in Westhoff Theatre will be Send the Light, a docudrama about the coming of electricity to the countryside, created by Bloomington-Normal resident (and ISU alum) Don Shandow, with songs by another Bloomington-Normalite (and ISU alum) Phil Shaw, and incidental music by David Berchtold. Shandrow, who is also the artistic director at New Route Theatre here in town, previously produced Send the Light in 2007 and again in 2011, with a cast that included local actors like Rhys Lovell and Irene Taylor. I believe it first played at the McLean County Museum of History, and then the Eaton Gallery as part of New Route's One Shot Deal series. This time it will find itself inside the black box known as Westhoff Theatre, directed by ISU faculty Connie de Veer and Michael Vetere.

Glyn Maxwell's The Forever Waltz, a contemporary verse play that retells the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, will be the first show of the season in Centennial West 207. Maxwell is a British poet and playwright whose plays Wolfpit (written in iambic pentameter) and Broken Journey played at New York City's Phoenix Theatre Ensemble. MFA director Leah Cassella will direct The Forever Waltz, which Talkin' Broadway reviewer Lindsey Wilson called "surreal, electrifying and poetic" as well as "more precarious than any murder mystery, more intelligent than any run-of-the-mill updated myth, and certainly more twisted and intriguing than any show I have seen in quite some time."

Centennial West 207 will also house the second half of Tony Kushner's "Gay Fantasia on National Themes," also known as Angels in America Part II: Perestroika, one of the best plays of all time. Angels in America won Kushner a Pulitzer Prize for Drama and two Tony Awards for Best Play (for its two separate pieces), and it hit No. 7 on the American Theatre Critics Association list of "most significant" plays of the 20th Century. And it won another boatload of prizes -- Emmy Awards this time -- when it was made into a stunning 2003 HBO miniseries directed by Mike Nichols and starring (wait for it) Meryl Streep, along with Al Pacino, Justin Kirk, Mary Louise Parker, Emma Thompson, Ben Shenkman, Patrick Wilson and original Broadway star Jeffrey Wright.

The lovely DVD cover of the HBO miniseries

Angels in America is an epic tale, set in the 1980s, concerning the AIDS plague, Mormons, Jews, human pustule and power broker Roy Cohn, Ethel Rosenberg, a drag queen turned night nurse, too much valium, the world's oldest living Bolshevik, and, of course, angels. Both parts of Angels in America have recently been revived, with critically acclaimed productions at New York's Signature Theatre (starring Star Trek's Zachary Quinto and Smash's Christian Bohrle) and Chicago's Court Theatre. I've seen both pieces of Angels in a small black box theatre -- Steven M. Keen directed them both at Urbana's Station Theatre some years ago -- and they worked beautifully. The intimacy of the setting provided challenges for Kushner's magical effects but also brought the sweetness and the pain in the story up close and personal. So we'll see what MFA director David Ian Lee does with his Perestroika in CW 207.

Angels in CW 207 and then... Fairies in the Center for the Performing Arts! ISU professor (and stage movement guru) Paul Dennhardt will direct Benjamin Britten's opera version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the beginning of 2014. Britten composed the music for this Midsummer, while Peter Pears wrote the libretto based on Shakespeare's play. Although there was a very well-regarded production of Midsummer the Opera at Chicago's Lyric Opera in 2010 (seen above), I am afraid I've never seen it. I did see (and hear) bits of Britten's Noye's Fludde in the movie Moonrise Kingdom, however, and that was charming and wonderful. This season's Midsummer (the play) should wet your whistle for the opera next year.

So who is the Mrs. Packard in Emily Mann's Mrs. Packard, scheduled for the CPA after Britten's Midsummer Night's Dream? According to materials at New Jersey's McCarter Theatre, where Mrs. Packard premiered in 2007, she was a real person sent into an insane asylum by her husband in Illinois in 1861. "Based on actual historical events, Emily Mann, author of Having Our Say, Execution of Justice, and many other acclaimed plays, creates a gripping and ultimately triumphant account of one woman's determination to right a system gone terribly wrong." This one will be directed by MFA director Vanessa Stalling, who was at the helm of The Maids last semester.

Director Leah Cassela will tackle Diana Son's Stop Kiss, an Off-Broadway hit in 1998 that explores the relationship between two women, Callie and Sara, who are attacked and beaten when they kiss on the street in New York City. Callie walks away with minor injuries, but Sara is more seriously hurt, causing repercussions that fuel the rest of the play. In an interview with Asian Week, Son said, "In the play, Callie and Sara are having their own private interaction when somebody in public is stopping them and saying, 'I have an opinion about you, I’m going to identify you.' That’s an experience I’ve had because of my ethnicity and gender, and certainly, one I’ve had because of my perceived sexuality. One day, my husband and I were walking on the street, and because I have short hair and I had on a suede jacket and jeans, when we stopped to kiss, a guy called us 'faggots.' So I can’t say that only because I am Korean American do I know what this is like; I know it from many points of view." Stop Kiss will play in Westhoff Theatre in 2014.

ISU's seasons always include Shakespeare, but the choice for 2014 will be the lesser-known Pericles, which was probably a joint effort between Will S. and a contemporary named George Wilkins. It's got all kinds of maritime mishaps, with pirates and storms and shipwrecks and a missing child named Marina (because she was born at sea). I've enjoyed Pericles both times it's appeared at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival in recent memory, and I look forward to seeing what David Ian Lee does with it in Westhoff Theatre.

And finishing up the season will be The Exonerated, the gripping true story of six men and women wrongly sent to Death Row put together from interviews, letters and official documents by Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen. "Moving between first-person monologues and scenes set in courtrooms and prisons, the six interwoven stories paint a picture of an American criminal justice system gone horribly wrong and of six brave souls who persevered to survive it." After a successful run on stage, The Exonerated was turned into a TV movie in 2005 directed by Bob Balaban, with a cast that included Brian Dennehy, Danny Glover, Delroy Lindo and Susan Sarandon. The poster image you see at left is from that version of The Exonerated. For ISU, Cyndee Brown will direct this chilling docudrama about everything that can go wrong in the American criminal justice system.