Seven plays and musicals will highlight West Hartford’s professional theatre’s 2015-16 season.

Submitted by Playhouse on Park

Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. announces the seven plays and musicals that will comprise the 2015-16 Main Stage Season at Playhouse on Park. The award-winning theatre continues its mission to ensure every performance in the Main Stage Season educates, entertains, and most importantly, challenges our audiences. Paramount to this mission is our diverse programming, which challenges our patrons to consider theatre in all forms.  The Season Seven Main Stage Series includes:

TUESDAYS WITH MORRIE  September 30, 2015 – October 18, 2015

By Jeffrey Hatcher and Mitch Albom, based on the book by Mitch Albom

The autobiographical story of Mitch Albom, an accomplished journalist driven solely by his career, and Morrie Schwartz, his former college professor. Sixteen years after graduation, Mitch happens to catch Morrie’s appearance on a television news program and learns that his old professor is battling Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Mitch is reunited with Morrie, and what starts as a simple visit turns into a weekly pilgrimage and a last class in the meaning of life.

“Unforgettable! No matter how well you tell the story, the play makes it more vivid, more shattering, more humorous.” —NY Magazine.

“Making the language of the book crisper, cleverer and more palatable…aphoristic wisdom, expressed with gallows wit.” —NY Times.

“A touching, life-affirming, deeply emotional drama with a generous dose of humor.” —NY Daily News.

PASSING STRANGE December 2, 2015 – December 20, 2015

Book and lyrics by Stew, music by Stew and Heidi Rodewald, created in collaboration with Annie Dorsen

From singer-songwriter and performance artist Stew comes PASSING STRANGE, a daring musical that takes you on a journey across boundaries of place, identity and theatrical convention. Stew brings us the story of a young bohemian who charts a course for “the real” through sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. Loaded with soulful lyrics and overflowing with passion, the show takes us from black middle-class America to Amsterdam, Berlin and beyond on a journey towards personal and artistic authenticity.   Passing Strange won multiple Drama Desk Awards including Outstanding Musical and a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical in 2008.

“Fresh, exuberant, bracingly inventive, bitingly funny, and full of heart.” —NY Times.

“The freshest musical in town! The songs rock harder than anything else on Broadway.” —Wall Street Journal.

“Stew tweaks the received wisdom of racial identity as cannily and wittily as any playwright since George C. Wolfe when he unleashed The Colored Museum in 1986.” —NY Sun.

THE CHOSEN  January 27, 2016 – February 14, 2016

Adapted by Aaron Posner and Chaim Potok from the novel by Chaim Potok

A standing-room-only hit wherever it has played, this award-winning adaptation from the award-winning novel is the story of two boys, two fathers and two very different Jewish communities—”five blocks and a world apart”—in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1940s. Set against the backdrop of WW II, the revelation of the Holocaust, and the desperate struggle of Zionism, THE CHOSEN remains not essentially political or religious but deeply human. This is a story of friendship, family and difficult choices that we must all make on the path to understanding, respect and reconciliation.

“…moving…examines the freedom that comes with the passage from childhood to adulthood—intellectual freedom, religious freedom, America’s promise of freedom.” —Philadelphia Weekly. 

I HATE HAMLET February 24, 2016 – March 13, 2016

By Paul Rudnick 

A young and successful television actor relocates to New York, where he rents a marvelous, gothic apartment. With his television career in limbo, the actor is offered the opportunity to play Hamlet onstage, but there’s one problem: He hates Hamlet. His dilemma deepens with the entrance of John Barrymore’s ghost, who arrives intoxicated and in full costume to the apartment that once was his. The contrast between the two actors, the towering, dissipated Barrymore whose Hamlet was the greatest of his time, and Andrew Rally, hot young television star, leads to a wildly funny duel over women, art, success, duty, television, and yes, the apartment.

Written by New Yorker contributor Paul Rudnick, who “may be the funniest writer for the stage in the United States today,” says The New York Times.

Paul Rudnick “knows where the laugh buttons are, and he pushes them like virtuoso.” — Los Angeles Times,

“Fast-mouthed and funny…It has the old-fashioned Broadway virtues of brightness without pretensions and sentimentality without morals.” —Village Voice. 

stop/time dance theater  March 30, 2016 – April 10, 2016

Conceived, directed and choreographed by Darlene Zoller

Playhouse on Park is the only professional theatre in the area to have a dance company in-residence.    stop/time performs an original production each year, which is now in it’s third year as part of the Main Stage season!

WIT  April 20, 2016 – May 8, 2016

By Margaret Edson

Margaret Edson’s powerfully imagined Pulitzer Prize–winning play examines what makes life worth living through her exploration of one of existence’s unifying experiences—mortality—while she also probes the vital importance of human relationships.  With her first play, Edson has created a work that is as intellectually challenging as it is emotionally immediate.  Exquisitely written, affecting and often humorous, WIT follows a brilliant and exacting poetry professor as she undergoes experimental treatment for cancer. A scholar who devoted her life to academia, she must now face the irony and injustice of becoming the subject of research.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the New York Drama Critics Circle Award, the Drama Desk Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Lucille Lortel Award, and the Oppenheimer Award

“A brutally human and beautifully layered new play…you feel both enlightened and, in a strange way, enormously comforted.” —NY Times.

“A dazzling and humane new play that you will remember till your dying day.” —NY Magazine.

A CHORUS LINE  June 15, 2016 – July 24, 2016  

Conceived and Originally Directed and Choreographed by Michael Bennett
Book by James Kirkwood & Nicholas Dante
Music by Marvin Hamlisch
Lyrics by Edward Kleban

The musical for everyone who’s ever had a dream and put it all on the line. Winner of nine Tony Awards, including Best Musical, and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, this singular sensation is one of the longest-running Broadway musicals ever.   A CHORUS LINE is a stunning musical-vérité about the achingly poignant ambitions of professional Broadway chorus dancers to land a job in the show, and is a powerful metaphor for all human aspiration. Memorable musical numbers include I Can Do That, At the Ballet, Dance: Ten; Looks: Three, The Music and the Mirror, What I Did for Love, One (Singular Sensation) and I Hope I Get It. It is a brilliantly complex fusion of dance, song and compellingly authentic drama. 

Season Six Subscribers will be able to renew their subscriptions throughout the month of April.   New subscriptions go on sale beginning May 1. Individual tickets will go on sale June 1. Subscribers save 20 percent over individual ticket prices; pricing ranges from $84 – $212 with a new $300 Producer’s Circle level.  Subscriptions come with additional benefits as well.

For more information, please call 860-523-5900 ext 10 or visit www.PlayhouseOnPark.org.