Hartford Stage 2014-15 Season: Some New Works, Same Old Faces

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William Shakespeare. Noel Coward. Matthew Lopez. Charles Dickens. A musical. A former artistic director returning to direct.

 

Seems that Darko Tresnjak has found a winning formula. The slate for the 2014-15 Hartford Stage season is remarkably like the theater’s 2013-14 one.

 

There are important distinctions, of course. This year’s production of a script by Lopez, whose The Whipping Man was at Hartford Stage in 2011 and whose Somewhere is about to have its East Coast premiere April 3-May 4) is a bonafide world premiere. The script has had a number of readings around the country, including at Hartford Stage’s Brand:NEW Fall Festival of New Works in late 2012. Then, it was described in a press release thus: “In the wake of personal tragedy, Jonathan has retreated from the world, but his upstairs neighbor Claire is determined to pull him into the whirlwind of her life. They build a tenuous connection, but the past reverberates into the present, threatening to destroy the fragile happiness they’ve found.”

 

This season’s Shakespeare was Macbeth, in an audacious repertory-theater  set-up with Marivaux’s Las Dispute. Next season it’s Hamlet, sans rep. Usually when a big theater announces that it’s doing Hamlet, they tell you right away who will be playing Hamlet. (Why would you plan such a tricky production if you didn’t know.) That was the case with Yale Rep and Paul Giamatti two seasons ago. But no word on casting yet for this one.

 

As for Noel Coward, Hartford Stage has shifted from one of his moody late-career dramas, A Song at Twilight (which closed this past weekend, March 16) to one of the big comedy hits of his prime, Private Lives. Coward himself co-starred in the original 1930 production, opposite Gertrude Lawrence, Laurence Olivier and Adrianne Allen. (Similarly, Coward starred in the premiere production of A Song at Twilight in 1966, his last theatrical role.)

 

The last show of the 2014-15 season is one which must be making the folks at the Goodspeed Opera House sigh. Just before he got the Hartford Stage gig, Darko Tresjnak was becoming a regular director at the Goodspeed, doing Carnival and City of Angels in consecutive seasons. Now he’s doing musicals at Hartford Stage, which wasn’t much known for promoting that particular artform during the reign of Tresnjak’s predecessor Michael Wilson. (On the other hand, during Mark Lamos’ time as Hartford Stage artistic director, the theater arranged two short William Finn musicals into what eventually became the hit Falsettos.) Tresnjak’s  Hartford Stage production of A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder went on to Broadway, where it’s still playing.

 

Michael Wilson is returning to Hartford Stage to direct the season-opening production of Connecticut-raised playwright Elizabeth Egloff’s Ether Dome, about Dr. Horace Wells and his pioneering use of anesthetics in the mid-19th century.

 

There’s another premiere in the season, the East Coast premiere of The Pianist of Willesden Lane, adapted by Hershey Felder (who also directs) from Mona Golabek’s The Children of Willesden Lane: Beyond the Kindertransport—A Memoir of Music, Love and Survival. Felder is a concert pianist with theatrical inclinations; he created the biographical concert George Gershwin Alone, which played numerous regional theaters (including Hartford Stage) as well as on Broadway and in London’s West End. The show is performed by the book’s author Mona Golabek, documenting the life of her mother Lisa Jura, who escaped the Holocaust via the Kindertransport mission in the early days of World War II. The Pianist of Willesden Lane has had successful runs at L.A.’s Geffen Playhouse, Chicago’s Royal George Theatre and at Berkeley Rep.

 

As seasons go, this one seems diverse, well-balanced and well-managed, with big shows and small, musicals and talky pieces, classics and classic names.

The basics:

 

Sept. 11 through Oct. 5: Ether Dome by Elizabeth Egloff, directed by Michael Wilson.

Oct. 16 through Nov. 9: Hamlet by William Shakespeare, directed by Darko Tresnjak.

Jan. 8 through Feb. 1: Private Lives by Noel Coward, directed by Darko Tresnjak.

Feb. 19 through March 15: Reverberation by Matthew Lopez, directed by Maxwell Williams.

March 26 through April 26: The Pianist of Willesden Lane, adapted and directed by Hershey Felder.

May 14 through June 7: Kiss Me Kate by Sam and Bella Spewack and Cole Porter, directed by Darko Tresnjak.

Plus the annual Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story of Christmas, in November/December.

 

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