Pasadena Playhouse wades into the vaccine debate with 2025-26 season led by Tony winner ‘Eureka Day'
'In these times we need laughter and we need to be able to think critically about ourselves,' Playhouse artistic director Danny Feldman said. 'An audience laughing together is such a good entrance to heavy themes and big ideas.'
Next up will be Peter Shaffer's 'Amadeus,' which opened in 1979 and won the Tony for best play in 1981 with Ian McKellen winning lead actor honors. Director Miloš Forman made it into a 1984 film, which won eight Oscars including best picture. Shaffer also won an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. The story is a fictional account of the contentious relationship between Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his rival, Antonio Salieri, the court composer of the Austrian emperor.
Calling 'Amadeus' one of the great pieces of historical fiction for theater, Feldman said it's a show he's been planning for the Playhouse for quite some time.
Another Feldman favorite, and the third show on next season's calendar, is a world-premiere adaptation of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's 1947 musical, 'Brigadoon.' The adaptation, by Alexandra Silber, remains true to the original, Feldman said, but 'really puts it forward for today's audience ... with covert but impactful changes that sharpen it in an exciting way.'
The two-person hip-hop musical, 'Mexodus,' rounds out the main stage offerings. A fifth show will be announced at a later date.
Written by and starring Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, 'Mexodus' explores the little known history of the Underground Railroad to Mexico. Using looped musical tracks that the men lay down live during the show, the production follows the journey of an enslaved man who flees south and meets a rancher.
'It's more of a musical experience than a traditional musical, so it's very genre busting and innovative,' Feldman said of the technique used to bring the music to life. 'It's a bit of a magic trick.'
Two family shows are on the schedule: 'The Song of the North,' created, designed and directed by Hamid Rahmanian for children ages 6-12; and 'The Lizard and El Sol,' originally developed and produced by the Alliance Theater in Atlanta for ages 5 and younger.
The former will be presented on the Playhouse's main stage, which is a departure from past family programming. 'The Song of the North,' based on a classic Persian love story and presented near the Iranian New Year, promises breathtaking visuals through the use of 483 handmade shadow puppets wielded by talented puppeteers.
'The Lizard and El Sol,' staged at local parks as well as in the Playhouse courtyard, tells the charming tale of a lizard in search of the newly missing sun. It's based on a Mexican folktale and presented mostly in Spanish, although it can be enjoyed by non-Spanish speakers too, Feldman said.
'We don't look at our family programming as separate,' says Feldman. 'It's really core to our mission.'
The season announcement comes during a banner year for Pasadena Playhouse. The State Theater of California celebrated its 100th anniversary in May, and in April it announced it had raised $9.5 million to buy back the historic campus it lost to bankruptcy in 1970 — putting the company in charge of its fate for the first time in more than 50 years.
That good news came two years after the theater became the second-ever L.A. organization to win the the Regional Theatre Tony Award.
'As we purchased our building and came into this moment of thinking about the next century, it felt like there was a very big assignment with this season,' Feldman said. 'How are we turning the corner into our next chapter?'
His answer: 'An expansion and continuation of what I think we do best at the Playhouse,' which is to think about the presentation of art and theater through a California lens.
Feldman said that with it being the state theater, he feels a unique responsibility to ensure that the work presented on the Playhouse stage engages with the world — but that it is also theater for everyone.
'What I love about this year is that it really is the full spectrum,' Feldman said. 'Comedies and tragedies and musicals and plays — old things and new things and kids' things.'
For tickets and additional information about the upcoming season, go to pasadenaplayhouse.org.
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Richard Thomas dons wig and mustache to play icon Mark Twain in one-man play touring the US
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Associated Press
17 hours ago
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Richard Thomas dons wig and mustache to play icon Mark Twain in one-man play touring the US
NEW YORK (AP) — Richard Thomas has not one but two big shoes to fill when he goes out on the road this summer in a celebrated one-man show. The Emmy Award winner and Tony Award nominee is portraying the great American writer Mark Twain in a play written and performed for decades by the late Hal Holbrook. Thomas immediately accepted the offer to star in the 90-minute 'Mark Twain Tonight!' that tours more than a dozen states this summer and fall before wondering what he'd gotten himself into. 'I walked down to the street and I said, 'Are you crazy? What are you out of your mind?'' he says, laughing. 'I had to grapple with who's the bigger fool — the man who says, 'Yes, I'll do it' or the man that says, 'No, I won't'?' Holbrook portrayed the popular novelist and humorist for more than a half century starting in 1954, making over 2,300 performances to a collective audience of more than 2 million. He and Thomas were fond of each other and would see each other's work. The show mixes Twain's speeches and passages from his books and letters to offer a multidimensional look at an American icon, who toured the U.S. with appearances. 'I'm going to feel very much like I'm not only following in Hal's footsteps, but in Twain's as well,' says Thomas, who began his career as John-Boy Walton on TV's 'The Waltons' and became a Broadway mainstay. Thomas jokes that Holbrook had 50 years to settle into the role and he has only a year or so. 'I have the advantage on him that he started when he was 30 and he was pretending to be an old man. I'm 74 so I'm right there. That's the one area where I'm up on him.' 'It's time for Twain' The new tour kicks off this week in Hartford, Connecticut — appropriately enough, one of the places Twain lived — and then goes to Maryland, Iowa, Arkansas, North Carolina, Kansas, Tennessee, New York, New Jersey, Utah, California, Arizona, Alabama, Utah and Florida by Christmastime. Then in 2026 — the 60th anniversary of the Broadway premiere — it goes to Texas, Colorado, Wisconsin and Ohio. 'It's time for Twain, you know? I mean, it's always time for Twain, always. He's always relevant because he's utterly and completely us, with warts and all,' says Thomas. The actor will travel with a stage manager and a trunk with his costumes, but all the other elements will be sourced locally by the venues — like desks and chairs, giving each show local touches. 'There's something about doing a show for people in their own community, in their theater that they support, that they raise money for. They're not coming to you as tourists. You're coming to them.' Thomas has done a one-man show before — 'A Distant Country Called Youth' using Tennessee Williams letters — but that allowed him to read from the script on stage. Here he has no such help. 'One of the keys is to balance the light and the shadow, how funny, how outrageous, the polemic and the darkness and the light. You want that balanced beautifully,' he says. Twain represents America Other actors — notably Val Kilmer and Jerry Hardin — have devised one-man shows about the creator of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, who still manages to fascinate. A new biography of Twain by Ron Chernow came out this year, which Thomas is churning through. Thomas sees Twain as representing America perfectly: 'He just lets it all hang out there. He's mean-spirited; he's generous. He's bigoted; he is progressive. He hates money; he wants to be the richest man in America. All of these fabulous contradictions are on display.' Thomas has lately become a road rat, touring in 'Twelve Angry Men' from 2006-08, 'The Humans' in 2018 and starring as Atticus Finch in Aaron Sorkin's adaptation of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' from 2022-24. Orin Wolf, CEO of tour producer NETworks Presentations, got to watch Thomas on the road in 'To Kill a Mockingbird' and says having him step into Twain will strengthen the theater community across the country 'It's so rare nowadays to have a true star of the road,' Wolf says, calling Thomas 'a breed of actor and artist that they rarely make anymore.' 'I'm delighted to be supporting him and delighted that he's chosen to do this because I think this is something he could also take on for hopefully many years,' he adds. After Twain, Thomas will next be seen on Broadway this spring opposite Renée Elise Goldsberry and Marylouise Burke in David Lindsay-Abaire's new comedy, 'The Balusters.' But first there's the eloquence and wry humor in a show about Twain that reveals he was often a frustrated optimist when it came to America. 'I think it reflects right now a lot of our frustration with how things are going,' says Thomas. 'Will things ever be better and can things ever better? Or are we just doomed to just be this species that is going to constantly eat its own tail and are we ever going to move forward?'
