IWU Theatre 2017-18: LUGHNASA and SOUTH PACIFIC Casts, Lab Theatre Info

The new season for Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts will bow in October, so this is a good time to fill in some blanks on the whos, whats and wheres.

IWU previously announced the main part of their season, with four shows set for the Jerome Mirza Theatre in MacPherson Hall.

Beginning October 3, we'll see Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel's memory play about five sisters trying to stay together and find some measure of happiness in a small village in rural Ireland in the 1930s. IWU Adjunct Instructor of Theatre Arts Michael Cotey will direct, with a cast that includes Cadence Lamb, Kamilah Lay, Hailey Lechelt, Cami Tokowitz and Libby Zabit as the Mundy sisters, with Tuxford Turner as Michael, the narrator who steps back in time to tell us about his mother and aunts, Sam Hulsizer as Gerry, a charming man who waltzes in and out of youngest sisters Chris's life, and Will Mueller as Father Jack, the older brother who has returned quite changed from a mission in Africa. Dancing at Lughnasa will play for five evening performances at 8 pm October 3 through 7, with a matinee at 2 pm on the 8th.

The classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific will take the stage November 14 to 19, with Emily Hardesty and Madison Steele alternating in the role of cockeyed optimist and Navy nurse Nellie Forbush; Timothy P. Foszcz as planter Emile de Becque, the handsome stranger Nellie meets one enchanted evening; Holden P. Ginn as Lieutenant Cable, a young Marine called by the mysterious power of Bali Ha'i; Megan Lai and Juna Shai alternating as Liat, a beautiful young Tonkinese woman who complicates Cable's life; Paola Lehman and Kira Rangel alternating as Bloody Mary, Liat's wheeling and dealing mother; and Connor Widelka as Seabee Luther Bills, another wheeler and dealer who has a way with a coconut bra.

As we move into 2018, Eugène Ionesco's absurdist Rhinoceros, about the dangers of conformity and groupthink, will be performed February 27 to March 4, with Xanadu, a fantastical musical involving a Greek muse who visits Earth and gets into roller disco, with music and lyrics by Jeff Lynne and John Farrar and book by Douglas Carte Beane, scheduled for performances April 10 to 15.

And what about the E. Melba Johnson Kirkpatrick Laboratory Theatre?

There's an October option there, too. Fault Lines by Ali Taylor, described as a "razor-sharp new comedy that exposes the dilemmas of working in charity today," is scheduled for performances October 27 to 29, with a cast that includes Andrea Froehlke, Morgan McCane, Emily Strub and Braden Tanner.

The Girl Who Fell Through a Hole in Her Sweater, a "witty adventure for young audiences" written by Naomi Wallace and Bruce McLeod, closes out the Lab Theatre season, with performances March 15 and 26.

Tickets for shows in the Jerome Mirza Theatre range from $10 to $12 for plays and $12 to $14 for musicals, with a season package option as well. Lab Theatre shows are $3 for general admission and $2 for students. For advance purchase for Fault Lines in the Lab Theatre, tickets will become available October 19 and for The Girl Who Fell March 8, 2018.

For information on the entire Mirza season, click here. For the Lab Theatre, click here.

IWU School of Theatre Arts Announces Mainstage Choices for 2017-18

Illinois Wesleyan University's School of Theatre Arts has announced via Facebook what will be on stage for the mainstage part of their 2017-18 season. No dates yet and the official IWU Theatre page is still showing last year's schedule, but at least we know what we'll seeing if not exactly when. I'm guessing checking back on that page periodically should yield a schedule at some point.

If the order of the photos indicated the order of the shows, first up will be Dancing at Lughnasa, Brian Friel's wistful, haunting memory play set in County Donegal in Ireland in 1936.  The Lughnasa in Dancing at Lughnasa refers to the August harvest festival. The five Mundy sisters are struggling to get by, from the eldest, Kate, a tightly wound schoolteacher, to Christina, the youngest, who has a child but no husband or other means of support. Their lives only get more difficult when their older brother, who'd been a Catholic missionary and chaplain in Africa, returns for unspecified reasons, but has trouble mentally balancing the world he left behind and the one he's reentered. Christina's son Michael is the narrator of the play, standing in for Friel. He appears as an adult to step back into the action of his childhood. Dancing at Lughnasa was first produced at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, thereafter transferring to London, where it won the Olivier Award for Best Play in 1991. On Broadway, it also took the Tony for Best Play, along with awards for director Patrick Mason and Best Featured Actress in a Play for Brid Brennan, who played Agnes, the shy, tentative sister somewhat overshadowed in the middle of the family, in its Dublin, West End and Broadway productions.

Rodgers and Hammerstein's 1949 musical South Pacific comes next in the picture scroll. Everybody knows "Some Enchanted Evening," "Bali Hai" and "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair," right? Based on James Michener's Tales of the South Pacific, this South Pacific features music by Rodgers, lyrics by Hammerstein and book by Joshua Logan, telling the stories of Americans stationed on islands in the Pacific. There's Navy nurse Nellie Forbush, who faces her own prejudices when she falls in love with a French plantation owner named Emile de Becque who has mixed-race children; a squadron of rowdy Seabees led by Luther Bills; and Lieutenant Cable, a forthright young officer in the midst of dangerous missions and a love affair with a native woman. As a child, I remember thinking Nellie was an idiot for her bigotry against two kids who were half-Polynesian, but that's the point of South Pacific, that our prejudices are not innate or logically justifiable but "carefully taught." The original Broadway production won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and piled up ten Tony Awards, including winning Best Musical along with awards for its book, score, director, producer and scenic design, and sweeping the acting categories, with wins for leads Mary Martin and Ezio Pinza, who played Nellie and Emile de Becque, and featured actors Myron McCormick, who played Billis, and Juanita Hall, who played Bloody Mary, the enterprising mother of Cable's beautiful love interest.

Next on the list in Eugene Ionesco's absurdist drama Rhinoceros, wherein the citizens of a French town inexplicably start turning into stampeding rhinoceroses. One by one, they sprout horns and hoofs, as a lone man, Berenger, tries to hold out against the onslaught. Rhinoceros was written in 1959 and is widely regarded as a cautionary tale about how mass movements like Fascism and Nazism can take over and turn people who were once reasonable human beings into fanatical monsters. In other words, it's perfect for our current international political landscape. Although actor/producer/director/mime Jean-Louis Barrault played Berenger in the original French production and Laurence Olivier took the role in London, it was Eli Wallach who made Berrenger (now with an extra R) his own on Broadway, with Zero Mostel as his intellectual friend John (originally Jean) who turned rhino in front of his eyes. In the showier role, Mostel was the one who won the Tony as Best Actor. In the 1973 film, Gene Wilder played a new version of Berenger called Stanley, with Mostel reprising his role.

In a real change of pace from the politically and personally provocative to just plain fun, the last show in IWU's mainstage season is the roller disco musical Xanadu, based on the 1980 film that starred Olivia Newton-John as a Greek muse. On Broadway, Kerry Butler took the Newton-John role, while Cheyenne Jackson played the man she's trying to inspire. Douglas Carter Beane spruced up the book from the film script, adding more mythology and a whole lot of parody to send up the campy movie. Along with the roller skates, songs from the movie like the title song and "All Over the World" came with it from screen to stage, with added hits like "Have You Never Been Mellow?" and ELO's "Strange Magic." Click here to see Jackson, Butler and the rest of the cast perform "Don't Walk Away" on the Tonys.

In case you're wondering, it was Kelli O'Hara who was nominated but did not win the Tony for the 2010 revival of South Pacific, whose poster image you see up top, while Kerry Butler -- the blonde in the poster just above -- was nominated but did not win for Xanadu in 2008.

Watch this space for more details on all these shows as dates are added. Check here for IWU's Laboratory Theatre schedule once that's added.

ISU Brings Out the Pretty Side of DANCING AT LUGHNASA

I've been reviewing theater for a very long time. I started writing for the Champaign News-Gazette in 1989, and at the beginning, my process was a bit like Jed Leland's in Citizen Kane, returning to the newsroom immediately after the performance to type up my thoughts. Without the manual typerwiter or the bottle of Scotch, of course.

I quickly discovered that my opinions were more fully formed if I let the performance sit overnight, just resting there till morning. I would wake up clearer and more focused on what I thought. And that's mostly been the way I've operated ever since. I let it sit. And then I can set out my opinion in a more reasoned, reflective manner.

I saw Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa at Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts on Friday, November 1. That's more than a week that I've let this one sit, and I have to admit, I'm still not exactly sure how to approach this production. Hmmm...

First, let's be clear that this was not your standard proscenium staging in the Center for the Performing Arts. Director Lori Adams chose to set the action of the play on a side portion of the CPA stage, bringing the audience onto the stage with the actors, seated on folding chairs arranged on risers, with some of the "grass" from the set extending into corners and pathways through the seating area. We entered from the side hallway and never went near the actual seats in the auditorium. I am generally all for environmental staging, bringing us closer to the drama, and Jen Kazmierczak's scenic design is certainly pretty and charming, carving out a niche within the larger space of the Center for the Performing Arts with a warm little cottage that represents the home of the Mundy sisters and an overreaching tree with a beautiful blue sky in the background.

Likewise, Lauren Lowell's costume design is pretty, with a flouncy embroidered skirt here, an exquisite lace apron there, and an adorable pair of Mary Janes with red, gathered straps that my mother would've killed for when she was a teen in the late 30s.

The set and the costumes make for a lovely, idyllic tableau. It might also be an appropriate tableau for a memory play, one in which our adult narrator, Michael, steps back in time to conjure up the world of his mother and her sisters as he remembers them in 1936. But Michael is not a sentimental narrator. He knows full well -- and he tells us -- that the Mundy household was teetering on the edge of poverty at this precise moment. His memories include shoes with thin, much-mended soles and missing laces, and a dinner with three eggs stretched to make a meal for eight people.

In performance, this Dancing at Lughnasa is sweet and languid and almost like a fairytale. That makes for an interesting choice, if not necessarily the most dramatic choice, or the one most connected to the stark financial reality the sisters face. Yes, Dancing at Lughnasa is a play about family. But it's also about poverty, about the lack of options for women in Depression-era Ireland, about the difficulty of finding a way to keep a family together in a place where customs, rules and a hugely repressive church conspire against them. That's why their dance is such a revelation, because it breaks through the grim reality of their lives for one joyous, life-affirming moment. It should shatter the pervasive oppression. But we're missing the oppression here.

Among the cast, Fiona Stephens and Jaimie Taylor stand out as sisters Kate and Maggie. Kate is the most serious and responsible sister, and Stephens does an excellent job of giving her enough pride and enough backbone as well as a sense of underlying despair. She's the one who feels the burden.

In contrast, Taylor's Maggie is the family jokester, the one brimming over with life, the one who livens things up for her sisters and for the audience. Taylor is a breath of fresh air in the role.

Dancing at Lughnasa is a beautiful play, and this is certainly a beautiful production. It's so pretty to look at that you want to love it. But I think the play is deeper than this.

DANCING AT LUGHNASA
By Brian Friel

The School of Theatre and Dance at Illinois State University
Center for the Performing Arts

Director: Lori Adams
Scenic Designer: Jen Kaczmierczak
Costume Designer: Lauren Lowell
Hair and Makeup Designer: Narissa Tovey
Lighting Designer: Caisa Sanburg
Sound Designer: Glenn Wilson
Choreographer: Duane Boutté
Dialect Director: Connie de Veer

Stage Manager: Matthew T. Black

Cast: Robert Michael Johnson, Fiona Stephens, Jaimie Taylor, Faith Servant, Natalie Blackman, Elsa Torner, Ronald Roman, Arif Yampolsky.

Running time: 2:20, including one 15-minute intermission

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.

Opening Friday: ISU's DANCING AT LUGHNASA

Sisters are always popping up on the page and on the stage, from Shakespeare's Weird Sisters in Macbeth to Goneril, Regan and Cordelia in King Lear, Chekhov's Three Sisters, the March girls in Little Women, the Southern Gothic Magrath sisters in Beth Henley's Crimes of the Heart, Wendy Wasserstein's New York Jewish Sisters Rosensweig, and last summer's Fail sisters at the Illinois Shakespeare Festival, who found their place in Chicago in the 1920s.

Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa has five sisters, not three, and they're in Ireland, not Russia. Still, it's hard not to see the similarities between Friel's women and Chekhov's. The eldest works too hard and is a schoolteacher and one of the others is smitten with an impossible love. Both sets of women are stuck somewhere provincial and suffocating, somewhere they don't want to be, and money and gender pay big parts in who can do what and go where. Each family also has a brother, and he brings complications that only make their lives more difficult. And yet... Chekhov's women are so very Russian. And Friel's are so very tied to Ireland.

Plus Lughnasa is a memory play, as our narrator, a man named Michael, steps back into the childhood he remembers, with his image of his mother and her sisters what we see on stage. There's another factor that sets the Mundy sisters apart, too, in the poverty that pervades their humble abode. Money may be a problem for the Prozorovs, but it's a grinding reality for Kate, Maggie, Rose, Agnes and Christina Mundy. But what makes Lughnasa stand apart is neither the memory play issue or the financial distress they're in. Instead, it's the sense of joy in the midst of that poverty, of dancing even when the soles of your shoes are wearing very thin.

Dancing at Lughnasa began its life in Ireland, as you might expect, in a very well-regarded production at Dublin's Abbey Theatre in 1990. Much of the Irish cast traveled with the play to London and then New York, including Brid Brennan, who won a Tony Awards for her portrayal of Agnes. That production also took home Tonys for the play itself and for director Patrick Mason.

The Cusack sisters (Sorcha, Niamh and Sinéad -- who've also done Three Sisters, by the way) appeared in a 2009 London revival, while Meryl Streep joined Brid Brennan for the 1998 film version.

Lori Adams directs Dancing at Lughnasa for Illinois State University's Center for the Performing Arts in performances from November 1 to 9. Robert Johnson will play Michael, the narrator who steps back into his youth, with Faith Servant and Natalie Blackman as Agnes and Rose, and Ronald Roman as Gerry, the dashing Welshman who comes back into Christina's life at all the wrong times. Johnson, Servant, Blackman and Roman are all part of ISU's new class of MFA actors. Fiona Stephens will play Kate, the oldest and most responsible sister, while Jaimie Taylor takes on Maggie, the one who likes to laugh. Rounding out the Mundy family, Elsa Torner will play Christina, Michael's mother, and Arif Yampolsky will play Father Jack, the brother who went to Africa as a priest but came back very much changed..You can see all the details here including how to get tickets.

Who'll Be DANCING AT LUGHNASA for ISU

Lori Adams

Fresh off her off-Broadway triumph with Deanna Jent's Falling, director Lori Adams returns to the Illinois State University Center for the Performing Arts at the helm of the lovely and lyrical Dancing at Lughnasa. This memory play, written by Brian Friel,  is set in his native Ireland, and its original production took place at the famed Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 1990.

Friel is sometimes called the Irish Chekhov, and Dancing at Lughnasa bears that out in some respects. Instead of Chekhov's Three Sisters, Friel focuses on five sisters, the Mundys, who live together in a small cottage outside the fictional town of Ballybeg in County Donegal. We see Kate, Maggie, Agnes, Rose and Christina Mundy from the point of view of Michael, Christina's son, as he shares his memories of his mother and her sisters in August, 1936. Their lives are complicated not just by the murky romantic possibilities of that moment in their lives, but also by their difficult financial situation, and the return of their brother -- much changed and very unwell -- after 25 years of mission work as a priest in Uganda.

Dancing at Lughnasa is poignant, sweet and sad, as we learn about the sisters' dreams and disappointments, and how Friel's stand-in, Michael, was affected by it all. The play has been honored with numerous awards, including the 1991 Olivier Award in London and the 1992 Tony Award for Best Play for its Broadway production. You can see the Broadway poster at right.

The 1998 film version, featuring Meryl Streep as oldest sister Kate, also made an impression, winning an Irish Film and Television Award for Brid Brennan, who played Agnes. Brennan had previously won the Tony for the same role in the Broadway production.

Lori Adams has cast MFA actor Robert Johnson as Michael, our narrator who steps back into his youth, with fellow graduate actors Faith Servant and Natalie Blackman as Agnes and Rose, and Ronald Roman as Gerry, Michael's father and the man who rides back into Christina's life with a flourish. Fiona Stephens and Jaimie Taylor will play Kate and Maggie, the taskmaster and the joker in the family, respectively, while Elsa Torner will take on Christina, Michael's mother.

Performances of Dancing at Lughnasa are scheduled for November 1 to 9 at the ISU Center for the Performing Arts. You can click that link under the title to see the Department of Theatre and Dance's entire 2013-14 slate of productions as well as ticket information.

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.