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The Western Stage 2007: Theatre with a Social Conscience

The Western Stage announces its 2007 season, and it promises to deliver some new twists to its tried and true format. On the Mainstage – Kiss Me Kate, I Love You You’re Perfect Now Change, and South Pacific, in the Studio Theater Bus Stop, Nickel and Dimed, The Hostage and The Threepenny Opera. Call the box office at 755-6816 for more information, or visit the website at westernstage.com. Season subscription packages are now available online! (74 word PSA)

Salinas, CA—December 3, 2006

The Western Stage, the Monterey Peninsula’s Premiere Regional Theatre, announces its 2007 season, and it promises to deliver some new twists to its tried and true format.

Of course, TWS will continue its fourth decade with its usual dynamic season of captivating drama, laugh out loud comedy, and rollicking music. Yet, when one looks over the selection of plays being offered for the coming year, one cannot help but notice a common thread running throughout the season. From Brendan Brehan’s The Hostage, which explores the plight of a British soldier taken hostage by the IRA, to Rodger and Hammerstein’s South Pacific, which tackles interracial relationships during World War II, The Western Stage is definitely gearing up for a season with a social conscience.

Yet, Artistic Director Jon Patrick Selover warns making a political or social point is not his primary consideration when choosing a season. “I need to balance out commercial accessibility while selecting plays that challenge our company,” he said. That each play in TWS’ 2007 lineup has a strong point to make about issues affecting contemporary society is just indicative of his tastes in literature, said Selover. “Even with musicals, I like conflict beyond the mundane.”

Some shows, however, were clearly chosen to speak to issues presently affecting the Salinas community. Take, for instance, Joan Holden’s adaptation of Barbara Ehrenrich’s book Nickel and Dimed. The play recounts Ehrenrich’s three month investigation of the working poor in America, in which she went undercover as a waitress, maid, and a clerk at “Mal-Mart” to experience first-hand the struggles faced every day by low wage workers across the United States. It is an issue which Selover sees as clearly affecting many Salinas residents. “This is our community. These are our neighbors,” said Selover.

Even William Inge’s classic Bus Stop, which will open The Western Stage’s 2007 Season in June, has more to it than meet the eye. “It’s certainly no piece of fluff,” said Selover. Although the play deals with the romantic entanglements of eight Midwestern eccentrics stranded at a roadside diner, its exploration of the many forms love can take can touch some uncomfortable nerves, especially the relationship between a rowdy cowboy who kidnaps a nightclub singer with the intention of dragging her back to his ranch and making her his wife. “It’s funny,” says Selover. “But if you take a step back, it’s not funny.”

In addition to a season of socially relevant plays, The Western Stage’s 2007 lineup has two productions entering uncharted territory for the company.

The first is TWS’ production of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s classic The Three Penny Opera. “Brecht and Weill are really important artists in the development of 20^th Century theatre,” said Selover, who studied both groundbreaking artists extensively in college. “And this will be the first time we touched them.” Through the adventures of the nefarious criminal Mack the Knife and his underworld colleagues, Brecht and Veil tried to highlight how the values of the criminal world reflect those of Capitalist society. Selover adds that The Threepenny Opera will also be the first musical the company has produced in the Studio Theater since its production of Honk! in 2000.

At around the same time Mack the Knife will be crooning for Studio audiences next summer, TWS will also be entering new territory with its Mainstage production of I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change. Not only will it be the first main stage musical the company will take on its now annual journey to the Sunset Center in Carmel, but it will also be the first Mainstage show in recent memory the company has produced with such a small cast. Instead of forty to fifty actors on stage, I Love You, Your Perfect, Now Change will only feature four. Two women and two men slip in and out of more than eighty characters as the play explores the ups and downs of contemporary romance in a series of sketches that take audiences from horrific first dates through the trials of family life.

Finally, in a similar vein, TWS will also be opening its Mainstage season with what many consider Cole Porter’s greatest musical, Kiss Me Kate. Based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, this battle royale of the sexes features such standards as “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”, “Wunderbar”, and the bawdy “Tom, Dick, and Harry”.

Priority season reservations are now being accepted only through the Friends of The Western Stage donation program that has received a boost through the recently established Western Stage Endowment. Call 831-755-6980 for more information. Season tickets are still the best bargain, saving subscribers up to 42% off of the door price. Season ticket packages are now available. Call 831-375-2111 for more information or for a season brochure mailing in late winter. Single tickets will go on sale in April. Groups interested in purchasing a block of tickets should take advantage of TWS’ special group rate by calling Ron Cacas, TWS’ Marketing and Public Relations Manager, at (831) 759-6012.

For further information on TWS’ upcoming season, read the show descriptions below.

Dan Tarker

Literary Associate

Bus Stop

By William Inge

When a snowstorm closes the road to Topeka, a motley group of strangers are suddenly thrust together at a roadside diner in this bittersweet romantic comedy from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of Picnic and Academy Award winning screenwriter of Splendor in the Grass. Based on a real incident Inge observed on a bus trip from Missouri to Kansas in which a man unwaveringly pursued a woman at every stop, the narrative of Bus Stop centers on Cherie, a less than talented nightclub singer who has been kidnapped by Bo, a rowdy cowboy dead set on dragging her home to his in ranch in Montana and making her his wife. Joining them during this blustery evening are Mr. Lyman, an alcoholic professor forever quoting Shakespeare; Elma, a high school girl who swoons for poetry; Grace, the worldly owner of the diner; Carl, the bus driver; Will, the town’s hard nosed Sheriff; and Virgil, Bo’s companion. To escape the misery of another night of loneliness, these eight lost souls put on a variety show that becomes a catalyst for the many romantic intrigues that have evolved at the bus stop over the course of the night creating, as Inge himself described it, a “composite of varying kinds of love, from the innocent to the depraved.”

Kiss Me Kate

Music and lyrics by Cole Porter

Book by Bella and Samuel Spewack

It’s a knock-down, drag-‘em-out, battle royale of the sexes—all to the music of Cole Porter. Recently divorced musical actors Fred Graham and Lili Vanessi are performing together again in a Broadway-bound revival of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew when life begins to imitate art in this lively and romantic play-within-a-play. When a wedding bouquet from Graham to another actress in the production is accidentally delivered to Lili, she finds her feelings for her ex-husband re-awakened. When she discovers that the flowers weren’t meant for her, she threatens to walk off the show. Lili and Fred begin feisty romance that mirrors their onstage performances as Katharine and Petruchio. Considered a comeback musical for Cole Porter after a car accident several years before left him in intolerable pain, Kiss Me Kate proved to be the most successful musical of his career, running over a thousand performances and earning five Tony Awards in 1949. The show features eighteen Porter classics including “Wunderbar”, “Too Darn Hot”, “Brush-Up Your Shakespeare”, “I Hate Men”, and the bawdy “Tom, Dick, and Harry”.

The Threepenny Opera

After John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera

Book by Bertolt Brecht

Music by Kurt Weill

The play that changed the course of Western Theatre. Set in an underworld of beggars, bandits, and prostitutes in London’s SoHo district, this update of John Gray’s 1728 The Beggar’s Opera transforms the highwayman Macheath, Mac the Knife, into a burglar, pimp, arsonist, and murderer sporting a fashionable pair of kid gloves. When Mac marries Polly, the daughter of Jonathan Peachum (The King of the Beggars), Peachum and his wife set out to destroy their nefarious son-in-law. The problem? Mac is good friends and financial partners with Tiger Brown, the Chief of Police, who is protecting him. Yet, when Peachum threatens to ruin Queen Victoria’s Coronation by having his army of beggars line the streets during the ceremony, Brown has no choice but to imprison Macheath where he faces certain execution. A powerful and highly entertaining critique of Capitalism, Brecht uses the profiteering criminals in this, his greatest masterpiece, to highlight how the morality of the hoodlums and beggars is intrinsically bound to the bourgeois morality of bankers and businessmen. With an inventive and haunting, rough and sexy, mocking and bittersweet score by Kurt Weill that was influenced by the sounds of American jazz and the music of 1920’s German Cabaret, this first of its kind pop opera became an overnight international sensation that has influenced the musicals Chicago, Cabaret, Urinetown and Robert Wilson and Tom Waitt’s The Black Rider.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change

Book and lyrics by Joe DiPietro

Music by Jimmy Roberts

“Its Seinfeld set to music,” hailed the Sun Ledger. Currently in its eleventh off-Broadway season, this hurly-burly tour of modern day suburban romance is now the longest running musical review in New York City’s history. Begun as a series of vignettes called Love Lemmings, writer and lyricist Joe DiPietro teamed up with composer Jimmy Roberts to create a series of musical sketches exploring the relationship gambit from A to Z. Act One focuses on good dates, bad dates, and nightmarish dates while Act Two delves into marriage, childbirth, in-laws, and the death of a spouse. With only four actors playing 20 roles a piece, it is a dazzling theatrical experience—especially with a significant other. The play has, in fact, not only become notorious for nudging and giggling that takes place among couples in the audience, but for also inspiring more than one audience member to get down on his knee during a performance and offer his date a diamond engagement ring. It’s a perfect play for anyone whose ever been in love, fallen out of love, wished they were in love, been hurt by love, or are now in love….In other words, it’s the perfect play for everybody.

Nickel & Dimed (Or Not Getting By in America)

Adapted by Joan Holden from the book Nickel and Dimed (or Not Getting by in America) by Barbara Ehrenrich.

Her journey began with a slip of the tongue. Tired of writing the same old articles for Harpers and the The Atlantic Monthly, journalist and activist Barbara Ehrenrich suggested to her editor that she go undercover and do a story about the working poor in America. Little did she suspect that her editor would go along with such a far out notion. In Joan Holden’s acclaimed stage adaptation of Eldenrich’s bestselling 2001 book, audiences follow Eldenrich as she goes on her eye opening investigation, working as a waitress, maid, and clerk over the course of three months. Although she begins with abundant bravado, she quickly discovers in a deeply personal way just how hard it is for low-wage workers to survive. She meets women like Carlie, a bitter and overworked maid who eats bread crumbs for lunch; Holly, the team leader at Magic Maid who fears she will lose her job and 50 cent raise because she is pregnant; and Maddy, a single mother who locks her young children in a room so she can go to work because she can’t afford daycare on her meager $6.50 an hour wage. Balanced by compelling characters and lots of humor, this exploration of the day to day struggle of the working poor in America will make you laugh, cry, and clench your fist in anger. As Time magazine noted, Nickel & Dimed is “a rare example of theatre that tries to open people’s eyes to the way life is lived in the real world—and maybe even rouse them to action.”

The Hostage

By Brendan Behan

It sounds like a plot ripped from the front page of today’s New York Times. A young British soldier is captured and held hostage until the British government agrees to release an Irish Republican Army soldier who is slated to be hung to the following morning. If his neck touches the noose, so too will the neck of the young British soldier. Drawing on an eclectic mix of theatrical styles from vaudevillian slap-stick to rollicking song and dance, Behan creates a tragic-comic farce that tackles the still burningly relevant issues of terrorism, warfare, and colonialism. Originally written in Irish Gaelic under the title of An Gial, Behan drew on his own experience as a soldier for the IRA who was twice sentenced to prison for attempted acts of terrorism. Many consider The Hostage the capstone to his tragically short and turbulent career.

South Pacific

Music by Richard Rodgers

Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

Book by Oscar Hammerstein and Joshua Logan

Adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener

One of the Great American Musicals. Set on a South Pacific island against the backdrop of World War II, Emile de Becque, a middle-aged French plantation owner, and Ensign Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse, fall in love only to have their impending marriage derailed when Nellie discovers that her fiancée has had two Eurasian children with a Polynesian girl. Unable to reconcile her discomfort with the mixed race children, she threatens to call the marriage off. Meanwhile, in a parallel plot, a Marine Lieutenant named Cable comes to the island to ask Emile to help him on a mission to set up a coast watch on a nearby Japanese held island. While visiting Emile, Cable falls in love with the daughter of Bloody Mary, a Tankanese souvenir dealer. However, when Mary tries to persuade Cable to marry her daughter, Cable refuses because of her race. In the meantime, Emile, perceiving that he lost everything by losing Nellie, decides to help Lieutenant Cable on his dangerous mission. Considered one of Rodger and Hammerstein’s greatest and most controversial musicals, this Pulitzer Prize winning drama about love overcoming racial prejudice features such timeless standards as “Some Enchanted Evening”, “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outta My Hair”, “Younger than Springtime” and “There is Nothing Like a Dame”.