Season Announcement
Musical romps and far-flung plays populate Irving theater's 2020-21 season
It may be difficult to look too far ahead right now, but that's exactly what Mainstage Irving-Las Colinas is doing. Its 2020-21 season doesn't start until November, so hopefully everything will be able to proceed as planned by then.
It includes five productions — two musicals and three plays — plus the organization's annual Christmas fundraising concerts in December, all of which will be produced in the Dupree Theatre at the Irving Arts Center.
Additional projects will be announced at a later date, and will be presented at the theater's new space, Mainstage 222, in downtown Irving.
Everything kicks off with the homicidal romp A Gentleman's Guide to Love & Murder. The Tony Award-winning musical comedy by Robert L. Freedman and Steven Lutvak, based on the novel Israel Rank by Roy Horniman, tells the uproarious story of Monty Navarro, a distant heir to a family fortune who sets out to jump the line of succession by — you guessed it — eliminating the eight pesky relatives (all played by one fearless man) who stand in his way. It runs November 6-21, 2020.
A season add-on is next: the return of Have Yourself A Broadway Little Christmas. Irving's own Amy Stevenson and Craig Boleman are back with an all-star cast of DFW's best musical talents to perform your favorite Broadway holiday songs. Guests will be swept away by hits from a variety of musical favorites like White Christmas, Mame, Holiday Inn, Elf, and many more. The evening will conclude with a holiday sing-along as well as auction and raffle opportunities. It runs December 10-12, 2020.
Nilo Cruz's Pulitzer Prize-winning Anna in the Tropics opens 2021, a poetic play set in 1929 in a Floridian Cuban American cigar factory. It's a place where cigars are still rolled by hand and "lectors" are employed to read newspapers, poetry, and novels to the workers. The new lector reads Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, unaware that the passions it inflames will spin the listeners' relationships out of control. It runs January 22-February 6, 2021.
Ken Ludwig has an extraordinary new take on the legend with Sherwood: The Adventures of Robin Hood. A fun romp full of swashbuckling and romance, it's a moving tale of a young man's discovery that everyone has a responsibility to care for his fellow man. It runs March 12-27, 2021.
Enchanted April, by Matthew Barber and from the novel by Elizabeth Von Arnim, is set under the Mediterranean sun where four women clash, and then begin to bond and bloom. It explores the rejuvenating effects of an Italian sojourn on two beleaguered 1920s London housewives and the two upper-class women they recruit to split the rent on a vacation villa. It runs May 7-22, 2021.
Both touching and hilarious, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown whisks us off to sexy 1980s Madrid, and to the unravelling world of Pepa, Pepa's wandering lover, the lover's nutty ex-wife, their son and his fiancee, Pepa's ditzy friend and that friend's suspicious boyfriend, plus a lawyer and a talkative taxi driver. Based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar, this musical farce has a book by Jeffrey Lane and music and lyrics by David Yazbek. It runs July 23-August 7, 2021.
Season tickets, which range from $85-$110, will go on sale on June 1, 2020. Single tickets will be available on August 1, 2020. For ticket information, call the Irving Arts Center Box Office at 972-252-2787 or visit www.irvingtheatre.org.
