Last week, Soulstice Theatre formally announced its 2013-2014 season. There's quite a lot on the schedule that jumps out at me…
Schoolhouse Rock Live! The new season for Soulstice starts July 25th through August 10th with a show that was popular amongst Gen X hipsters back in the mid-'90s. (I saw a production at The Body Politic in Chicago in '96, I believe…) the old animated eduction shorts that aired on ABC throughout the '70s, '80s and '90s introduced quite a few of us to the importance of conjunctions, the number zero and how a bill becomes a law. (Among other things.) The music is enduring enough that it's every bit as disturbingly catchy live as it is in those old animated shorts.
Betrayal by Harold Pinter. Arguably one of the best dramatic scripts of the late 20th century, Pinter's story of the murkiness of truth in human interaction runs September 12th through 28th. The studio theatre environment that Soulstice fosters should make this one of the better shows to open next September if they can get the right cast for it.
Picasso at the Lapin Agile --and this would've probably been the single biggest name to pop out at me from the upcoming season. Steve Martin is a brilliant comic writer. Here he's working with Einstein, Picasso and Elvis . . . all of whom meet and hang out in a delightfully bizarre script. November 7th through 23rd.
God --I absolutely love that this schedule goes straight from Steve Martin to Woody Allen. And this is a genius script. It opens with two characters trying to figure out how to end the play that they're in. Very, very clever early period Wood Allen from the mid-1970's. And I'm going to have to wait until next January to see it . . . January 24th through February 8th to be precise.
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Still Life-- Soulstice's season winds down with the penultimate show of its season April 3rd -19th 2014 with Alexander Dinelaris' drama about a photojournalist who is challenged by the death of her father. This one's relatively new having only just debuted a couple of years ago.
And then May 28th - June 21st, Soulstice runs two different shows in repertory:
Metamorphoses--is Mary Zimmerman's mid-'90s adaptation one Ovid's poem of the same title. The creation of the world from the perspective of the ancients runs in alternation with Adam Guettel's Myths and Hymns--a musical revue that tells many stories of ancient Greece including appearances by characters such characters as Icarus, Sisyphus and Saturn.
For more information about Sousltice, visit them online.
