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2012-2013 Audience Survey

Below are two lists of titles that we are considering for the upcoming season. These include both MUSICALS and PLAYS.

We are not listing any new plays that are under consideration, as the titles and in most cases the authors will be completely unknown to our audience. But we do appreciate your input in the selection process and we take that input seriously. 

Please visit our survey at https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/BQ6SSK9 to record your choices! (Vote only once, please!)

If you'd like more information on the shows listed, simply click the titles (where links are provided) to be directed to additional information, or visit our YouTube Channel to hear from incoming artistic director Karen Azenberg talk about her survey selections:

Musicals

IN THE HEIGHTS – This slice of life from present day Washington Heights  in New York City tells the story of three generations of people, their hopes and dreams, successes and failures. An American Dream story for the present day – it also dispels the notion that neighbors don’t know one another in New York City and that there is no sense of community there. This show won the Tony for Best Musical in 2008.

SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS – We all know the movie with that iconic Michael Kidd choreography – imagine all that wonderful dancing live in front of you! Great story, fun for the whole family.

SHE LOVES ME – This romantic comedy is based on the same play as the movies "The Shop Around the Corner," "In the Good Ole Summertime," and "You’ve Got Mail." Two rival clerks from the same perfumerie become pen pals with one another never realizing who they are corresponding with. The score is by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick who also wrote "Fiddler on the Roof."

A CHRISTMAS CAROL, THE MUSICAL – Based on the Dickens tale, this is fabulous holiday entertainment for everyone – enhancing the original tale with glorious singing and dancing, all set in merry old England at Christmas time. This version was originally produced in New York at Madison Square Garden.

KISS ME, KATE – Cole Porter’s backstage story of the theatre company performing the "Taming of the Shrew" and the real-life love story that mimics Shakespeare’s classic. This has one of the most famous musical scores including the show business anthem "Another Op'nin Another Show," "Brush Up Your Shakespeare," and "So In Love."

THE PAJAMA GAME – Another famous singing and dancing musical – love affairs abound at the Sleep Tite Pajama Factory where labor and management battle in business and in matters of the heart. This is the Broadway show that started the career of Shirley MacLaine and featured choreography by the legendary Bob Fosse. A recent Broadway revival starred Harry Connick, Jr. The show includes such memorable songs as "Steam Heat," "Hey There (You With the Stars in Your Eyes)," and "Hernando's Hideaway."

CATS – The classic Andrew Lloyd Weber and T.S. Eliot feline extravaganza – I’d love to bring this to the SPMT stage – choreographically and scenically re-imagined for our audience.

JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT – Another Andrew Lloyd Weber favorite, the biblical tale of Joseph’s Dream told with an eclectic musical twist.

THE MUSIC MAN – I think this is one of my all time favorites: the traveling salesman who cons small town Iowans into buying band uniforms and instruments for their children and ends up falling for the town's librarian and becoming an honest man! The show features a Barbershop Quartet, singers and dancers, "The Wells Fargo Wagon," and "Seventy-Six Trombones"…who doesn’t love it?

SOMETHING'S AFOOT – Agatha Christie meets the British Music Hall in this musical version of "Ten Little Indians." I think this is one of the greatest undiscovered gems! Clever and surprising with the best title song ever…"Something’s Afoot and the butler didn’t do it!"

Plays

THE LION IN WINTER – A wonderful historical drama – with a few laughs – that is really a family drama. King Henry II and his estranged wife Eleanor of Aquitaine have three sons, each of whom would like to assume the throne upon Henry’s death. Each parent favors a different son and the third hopes to be the “tiebreaker." The chaos that ensues could only happen in a royal household…or could it?

THE TRIP TO BOUNTIFUL – No, not Bountiful, Utah….although I guess it could be. Horton Foote’s play is actually set in Texas. An aging widow living with her son and daughter-in-law desires nothing more than to return to her childhood home in Bountiful, where she believes she can return to her friends and live out her days in peace and dignity. This bittersweet story was also a popular film starring Geraldine Page.

GOOD PEOPLE – Set in Southie, a working class Boston neighborhood, the story revolves around Margie, a single mother who struggles from paycheck to paycheck and has just been let go from yet another job. She sets her sights on reconnecting with an old friend who has made it out of the neighborhood and found success, but is he prepared for Margie and what she has to say? This play is by Pulitzer Prize winner David Lindsay Abaire.

CLYBOURNE PARK – This play won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Borrowing from Lorraine Hansberry’s classic "A Raisin in the Sun," this play starts with the sale of a Clybourne Park home in 1959 to the first black family to buy in that neighborhood. The second act returns 50 years later to the same home being sold to a white couple. This is a wonderful satirical look at gentrification and race.

BILOXI BLUES – The second chapter in Neil Simon’s comic coming of age trilogy that began with "Brighton Beach Memoirs." In this play, Eugene is drafted into the army, experiences life away from home, people of other backgrounds and cultures, and we see him become a man right before our eyes. This play won the 1985 Tony Award for best play and starred Matthew Broderick.

BROADWAY BOUND – The final chapter in the trilogy chronicling the life of Eugene Morris Jerome. Home from the Army he begins his career as a comedy writer landing a job for a radio show meanwhile at home his parents’ marriage is disintegrating. Simon manages to get us laughing and crying at the ups and downs of family life.

THE ODD COUPLE – Oscar and Felix the most incompatible of roommates, are two men navigating love and life after divorce, to much comic effect. Still a favorite nearly 50 years after it was first produced starring Art Carney and Walter Matthau and later portrayed by Tony Randall and Jack Klugman in the television series.

OF MICE AND MEN – John  Steinbeck's play-novella set in the 1920s is the tragic story of George and Lennie, two itinerant ranch hands in search of enough work to buy a farm of their own. Lennie, a big man of limited mental capacity, and George, his protector, are faced with heartwrenching decisions when their circumstances at a new ranch spiral out of control. This play beautifully reminds us what it means to be human.

DON JUAN – The ultimate Casanova, Don Juan has left a swath of compromised young ladies in his wake and is consequently pursued by family members looking for justice. This Molière farce is a rollicking romp complete with the usual cast of disrespectful servants, mistaken identities, and a resolution giving justice to all.

THE IMAGINARY INVALID – Molière’s jab at the medical profession tells the story of the hypochondriacal Argan who plots to marry off his daughter to a wealthy suitor to pay his medical bills. It's hard to believe that this was written in 1673!

THE SISTERS ROSENSWEIG – Wendy Wasserstein’s play about family tension, social pressure and expectation, focuses on three sisters gathering at the London home of the eldest sister, Sara Goode on her  50th birthday. This play is fascinating as we get to know the three seemingly dissimilar sisters and learn how alike they really are.

CRIMES OF THE HEART – This Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy by Beth Henley is another story of three sisters. Babe, the youngest, shoots her boorish husband and her sisters rally to her defense. Set in Mississippi, this dysfunctional family story rivals the best reality television.

INTIMATE APPAREL – This is the bittersweet story of a lonely African-American seamstress who makes elegant undergarments for prostitutes and wealthy women. She begins a correspondence with a Caribbean laborer, maybe her only hope to find a husband, but things are never what they seem to be. A story of race and class, hope and desire, in early 20th century America.

STEPPING OUT – This is not a very well-known play but I saw it many years ago in London and completely fell in love with it. It is the story of an adult tap-dancing class; really, a slice of life in working class London and a disparate group of people who come together and find success.

SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION – Explores the existential premise that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else in the world by a chain of no more than six acquaintances. The plot of the play was inspired by the real-life story of David Hampton, a con man who managed to convince a number of people in the 1980s that he was the son of Sidney Poitier.