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THEATER FOLKS, FOR THE MOST PART, do their work more for love than money. Even so, an ebbing economy generally brings fewer shows and darkened stages. Broadway, for example, suffered an unusual slump in late 2008, with closings of hit shows that normally would have been kept open to benefit from the holiday tourist season.
Locally, however, our organizations seem to be hanging tough, nourished by new groups like the downtown Theatre Inc., which is in its second season of presenting classic works. Established companies are building on their success with presentations in second venues, like Cygnet with the Old Town Theatre, Lamb’s Players with the Horton Grand and Broadway/San Diego with the Balboa.
All this activity means that, typically, our new theater year looks to be brighter than ever. Although all full-year schedules haven’t been announced, highlights are already evident——including, as usual, a debut musical heading for Broadway. It’s The First Wives Club, coming to the Old Globe. The revenge-on-exes story, familiar from the popular film, is adapted by Rupert Holmes and complemented by music by the famed Motown team of Holland, Dozier and Holland.
The Globe also presents Working, an update of Stephen Schwartz’ musicalization of Studs Terkel’s paean to ordinary occupations, with additional songs by James Taylor and Tony winner Lin-Manuel Miranda. Other distinctive tuners around town include Cyg net’s Assassins, the controversial Stephen Sondheim–John Weidman revue about presidential killers; Broadway/San Diego’s offering of Rain: A Tribute to the Beatles; and the San Diego Rep staging of Brecht’s masterpiece The Threepenny Opera.
In the not-exactly-a-musical category, Lamb’s restages Joyful Noise, Tim Slover’s drama concerning the creation of Handel’s Messiah. The play premiered at Lamb’s in 1999 and went on to acclaimed productions off-Broadway and around the nation.
We also have a wealth of provocative dramas upcoming, particularly from smaller companies. Coincidentally or not, three concern families coping with the loss of children. North Coast Rep does Rabbit Hole, David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner about the accidental death of a young boy; Diversionary Theatre offers Carol Lynn Pearson’s Facing East, in which a Mormon couple deals with the suicide of their gay son; and Mo‘olelo Theatre stages Jane Martin’s Good Boys, focusing on fathers of sons, one black and one white, who died in a school shooting.
Less wrenching is the Globe’s premiere of Mark Olsen’s Cornelia, spotlighting the beauty queen who married George Wallace and became the powerful first lady of Alabama, and North Coast Rep’s Bulrusher, Eisa Davis’ poetic 2007 Pulitzer finalist about a young African-American woman coming of age as the civil rights movement begins.
Lighter brews are on tap as well. Broadway/San Diego brings in Tuna Does Vegas, the first new show in a decade by the comic team of Jaston Williams and Joe Sears, taking their Tuna, Texas, characters to Sin City. Lamb’s has again slated the local debut of Leaving Iowa, a Tim Clue–Spike Manton comedy about a man’s flashbacks to family car trips, which got pulled last summer because of a rights conflict. And La Jolla Playhouse concludes its 2008-09 schedule with Rick Elice’s Peter and the Starcatchers, an adventurous prequel to J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan.
One trend likely to continue in the economic squeeze: co producing. Moxie Theatre, still homeless but always fearless, is doing typically offbeat works: Marisa Wegrzyn’s The Butcher of Baraboo with Diversionary, and Caridad Svich’s The Labyrinth of Desire with Ion Theatre. Diversionary teamed with the Black Ensemble Theatre on Paul Oakley Stovall’s As Much as You Can, a dysfunctional-family comedy centering on a black gay man who brings home his white lover.
Ion, by itself, also burnishes its growing reputation with Martin McDonagh’s applauded dark comedy The Cripple of Inishmaan.
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