The Shubert Theater in New Haven announced its 2012-13 season this week. It’s a nice mix of classics (Les Miserables and West Side Story) and newer shows (Shrek, Addams Family, American Idiot), with an alternative, non-literary event (Blue Man Group) thrown in for good measure.
Two of the shows—Addams Family and Jersey Boys—have scripts by the writing partnership of Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice. (Brickman was Woody Allen’s co-screenwriter on Annie Hall, Manhattan, Manhattan Murder Mystery and Sleeper.) Two of the other shows—Shrek and Blue Man Group—have creepy, brightly painted people in them.
As happens a lot, most of these shows have already visited Connecticut—at the Bushnell in Hartford, which due to its size and resources tends to get first dibs on touring Broadway musicals. (The Shubert broke the Bushnell’s tour-premiere streak this past season with Fela!, but generally speaking Hartford’s always first.) I don’t mean that comment to discourage, however: later legs of national tours have their own delights, usually deriving from the familiarity of an ensemble that’s been with a show for a long while coupled with the excitement of a cast change or two in the lead roles. Certain shows, I’ve found, actually benefit from being scaled down in grandeur and scaled up in human energy, more dependent on performances than technical spectacle. Cabaret, Tommy and Hair are examples that spring readily to mind. I’m going to go ahead and predict that American Idiot and West Side Story will seem a different experience, with a different vibe, on the relatively small Shubert stage than it felt elsewhere. If you’ve seen them before, go again.
Details:
Sept. 25 through Oct. 7: The return of the Jersey Boys tour, which had a preview run at the Shubert in 2006 before the national tour even began. (A real coup at the time, the tour was built and rehearsed at the Shubert, then tickets were sold to a couple of public dress rehearsals.) The Jersey Boys tour had its “official” Connecticut premiere at the Bushnell, which hosted the show again just last year. Other Connecticut manifestations of Jersey Boys include performances by The Midtown Men, a concert act made up of the original Broadway leads in the show, at a Long Wharf gala and a Westport Country Playhouse special event.
The Jersey Boys booking gets a full two-week Tuesday-through-Sunday run, something which ALL the shows in the Shubert’s Broadway subscription series used to get not that long ago. Things started changing when CAPA took over management of the space about a decade ago, but well before that, the subscriber base had dwindled to where a two-week run meant an awful lot of empty seats. Jersey Boys is a mammoth hit and seemingly worth hanging around town for a fortnight.
December 28-30: Shrek The Musical. New Haven connection: the character’s creator, children’s book author and New Yorker cartoonist William Steig, attended the Yale School of Fine Arts for a whopping five days back in the 1930s.
Feb. 1-3, 2013: The Addams Family. Andrew Lippa, whose musical The Wild Party has a workshop at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in the late 1990s) did the music and lyrics to Brickman & Elice’s book. There was a nice exhibit of Charles Addams cartoons at the Bruce Museum a couple of years ago.
March 14-17: Blue Man Group. The troupe (one of whose three original members, Chris Wink, attended Wesleyan University) formed in the late 1980s and now has longrunning companies in New York, Boston, Florida, Vegas, Chicago, overseas and on tour, did a major theater tour, titled The Complex, which played the Oakdale in Wallingford in 2003. Members of the Blue Man Group also founded their own pre-K school, the Blue School, in 2008.
April 16-21: Les Miserables. A Broadway smash in 1985, a time when all the smashes were spectacle-based, Les Mis was a difficult show to tour and only played the largest venues. It wasn’t until the early ‘90s that a clever redesign—still using the iconic turntable set—could accommodate smaller, older theaters such as the Shubert. It’s barely been back since. A slew of 25th anniversary productions worldwide in 2010 included a new tour, which is still carrying on.
May 3-5: American Idiot. Based on the Green Day album, it’s an obvious choice for the “modern rock” slot which is a component of most Broadway subscription series these days. Last year the slot went to another Michael Mayer-directed musical written by a pop star, Spring Awakening. Before that, Rock of Ages and Hair were the prime picks.
May 31-June 2: West Side Story. Like Les Mis, this is an anniversary tour—only the show’s twice as old! Hard to think of West Side Story being 50, or of Rita Moreno being 80. Arthur Laurents, who wrote the script for this mid-20th century NYC street gang adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, directed this revival, which adds some Spanish-language scenes and lyrics. It was Laurents’ last major project before he died last May at the age of 93. The original Jerome Robbins choreography remains unchanged.
Only way to get tickets for the Shubert 2012-13 Broadway series at this early date is to subscribe (either to the full slate or with a four-show “Flex Subscription”) or by buying a “Free Advance Buyers Membership” for $50. Options are at http://www.shubert.com/presentations/subscriptions
Shubert Box Office is at (203) 562-5666 or 1-888-736-2663.
