On Theater: New shows ready for the new year
Happy new year. The change of the calendar also means that a plethora of new stage productions are warming up backstage and waiting to entertain their audiences.
Actually, the season is already underway. South Coast Repertory ushered in 2017 over the weekend with “The Roommate,” a black comedy about two mismatched women in a New York apartment. Martin Benson, in his 54th year with SCR, is directing.
Next up will be the Laguna Playhouse, which checks in Wednesday with “Chapatti,” a play about two eccentric animal lovers in Dublin. The comedy by Christian O’Reilly is directed by David Ellenstein.
Opening Jan.17 at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts is the musical “Matilda,” winner of four Tony awards on Broadway. It’s based on Roald Dahl’s novel about a young girl out to change her destiny.
Herman Melville’s classic novel “Moby Dick,” the story of a mad captain’s crazed search for a great white whale, comes to South Coast Repertory on Jan. 30 in a production by Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company.
Fans of the prolific mystery novelist Agatha Christie will have the chance to see the dramatization of her 50th book when “A Murder is Announced” opens Jan. 27 at the Newport Theatre Arts Center. Often called the best of the Miss Marple novels, it’s being directed by Sharyn Case.
Also opening Jan.27, at the Westminster Community Playhouse, is “The Wisdom of Eve,” Mary Orr’s play that inspired the Oscar-winning movie “All About Eve.” It’s the story of backstage backstabbing and a young ingenue’s carefully plotted coup against the star who befriends her.
The Costa Mesa Playhouse will open Feb. 3 with “A Piece of My Heart,” a story about women who served in Vietnam, unprepared for the horrors of war. The play spans two decades in its account of six women’s lives
Oscar Wilde’s vintage comedy “The Importance of Being Earnest” is being readied at Vanguard University for a Feb. 24 opening in the school’s Lyceum Theater in Costa Mesa.
The show that won the 2014 Tony Award for best musical — “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” — arrives Feb. 28 at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The twist here is that the lead actor portrays every single member of his family, both the murderer and the murdered, both male and female, young and old.
That’s the schedule for the first two months of 2017, a varied assortment of shows, most of them new to local audiences. Happy theatergoing.
TOM TITUS reviews local theater.
