Curtains up on the 2010-11 theater season in Madison
Zane Williams
Major Barbara is running through Oct. 2 at the American Players Theatre.
Theater season may lack the visceral punch of football season, but it also won’t disappoint by ending in a mostly superfluous game named after a steak restaurant chain. The 2010-2011 theater season is ready to storm the stage with dozens of plays by Madison’s many theater companies. The A.V. Club gives you a preview of what to expect.
Tony, Tony, Tony
This season, Madison theater companies are staging a handful of plays that have won Tony Awards, because nothing fills seats like the phrase “Tony Award-winning” on a poster. The Wizard of Oz fan-fiction of Wicked (Sept. 22-Oct. 10, Overture Center) will probably be the season’s box-office winner, while John Steinbeck’s The Grapes Of Wrath (Oct. 1-16, Wisconsin Union Theater) proves that you can win Tonys for being subdued. And even though it was written before the Tony Awards existed, it’s a sure bet that Tennessee Williams’ classic The Glass Menagerie (Oct. 1-16, Bartell Theatre) would have won a ton.
Lovers, friends, and frienemies
While the flashy shows win the Tonys, Madison theater is primarily concerned with small-scale relationships between lovers, friends, and enemies this season. Love transcends oceans in Across A Distance (Sept. 17-25, Wisconsin Union Theater) and 84 Charing Cross Road (Sept. 9-Oct. 2, Bartell Theatre), but can’t transcend the wall in the home of a sex researcher and his wife in Forward Theater’s production of In The Next Room, Or The Vibrator Play (Nov. 4-21, Overture Center). Neil LaBute’s The Mercy Seat (Feb. 9-19, Bricks Theatre) dissects an adulterous relationship between two people who worked at the World Trade Center and were getting intimate elsewhere when 9/11 happened. Audiences get a look into a complicated “true love” relationship in Verdi’s La Traviata (April 29 & May 1, Overture Center), examine the inner workings of a marriage in Dinner With Friends (Feb. 18-March 5, Bartell Theatre), and play voyeur to an intimate love affair in Peep (May 6-21, MercLab). Meanwhile, friendships dissolve under outside realizations in Souvenir (May 6-21, Bartell Theatre), evolve into something else in Last Summer At Bluefish Cove (Sept. 3-25, Bartell Theatre), and exist under great tension in The Last Supper (Jan. 28-Feb. 12, Bartell Theatre).
Family matters
It’s not just matters of the heart that dominate Madison plays this season; matters of the family play heavily too. A boy who wants to be a DJ battles with his father in The Yum Yum Room (Nov. 12-20, Wisconsin Union Theater). Family members deal with tragedies in Strollers’ production of The Seafarer (March 31-April 23, Bartell Theatre), as well as in Mercury Players Theatre’s The Velvet Sky (Oct. 8-23, Bartell) and Eurydice (April 1-16, Wisconsin Union Theater), and fathers and daughters quibble in Major Barbara (through Oct. 2, American Players Theatre). A man tries to prevent a new family from forming in Mozart’s famous opera The Marriage Of Figaro (Nov. 5 & 7, Overture Center), while a guy struggles with his other, worse half in Strollers’ production of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde (Oct. 28-Nov. 20, Bartell Theatre).
Work sucks, I know
Even if a climbing number of Madison residents are unemployed (5.9 percent), shows about work are popular this year. There’s Yoo-Hoo, Rent-A-Cop, And The Ambulance Chaser’s Bitch (Nov. 12-Dec. 19, Broom Street Theater), Madison Theater Guild’s The Spitfire Grill (Dec. 3-18, Bartell Theatre), and another staging of David Sedaris’ popular The Santaland Diaries (Nov. 26-Dec. 22, Bricks Theatre), which tells his story of working as an elf at Christmas time. Not all work plays are about work that is arduous, though. Two plays about writers being forced to change screenplays under commercial concerns—Forward’s Moonlight And Magnolias (April 28-May 15, Overture Center), a play about the writers of the Gone With The Wind movie, and Stage Q’s The Dying Gaul (Dec. 2-18, Bartell Theatre), about a writer who is forced to change his autobiographical screenplay about his lover dying of AIDS to something more mainstream—prove writing movies can be just as soul-crushing as making minimum wage.
Rock operas
Don't tell Ted Leo, but there are a handful of those dreaded “rock musicals” this theater season too. A young man awakens one morning to find himself covered in hair in Gorilla Man (April 7-16, Bricks Theatre), while one of the original rock ’n’ roll-influenced musicals, The Rocky Horror Show, returns to Madison (March 3-5, Wisconsin Union Theater). Meanwhile, the current champion of rock musicals, 2007 Best Musical Tony Award-winner Spring Awakening—a Duncan Sheik-scored rock musical adaptation of an 1891 play—also hits town (Oct. 23 & 24, Wisconsin Union Theater). And it might not be a typical rock musical, but Mel Brooks’ musical adaptation of Young Frankenstein (Feb. 22-27, Overture Center) is another example of someone taking something that’s fine as it is and shoehorning it into a musical-theater setting.
