It's hits past, present and future on the 1998-99 Fifth Third Bank Broadway Series season. Ragtime, due to be showered with Tony Award nominations May 4, will anchor the season, which also features old favorites Evita and Annie and the pre-Broadway tour of Footloose.
Ragtime, June 2-July 3.
All shows except Tony 'n' Tina will be at Aronoff Center for the Arts.
Audience involved
Tony 'n' Tina's Wedding is interactive theater that has actors performing all around the audience - "guests" of a "typical" Italian wedding. You're there for the ceremony, the reception line, the buffet, the dancing, the yelling, the food fight and the cutting of the cake. Meet "Father Happy Hour," Grandma Nunzio and Sister Maria. Dance with the bride. Explain wedding etiquette to Uncle Louis.
People have been going to the Wedding off-Broadway for more than a decade. The show has had a couple of go-rounds in local community theater. This professional version is touring specifically to cities where the Broadway Series plays. It has had an extended run in Columbus.
'Tomorrow' will come
Leapin' Lizards, Annie is going back on tour in a 20th anniversary production. No stars named yet, but the orphan still belts out "Tomorrow," finds a dog and Daddy Warbucks, does chorus line kicks with a bevy of squealing, adorable orphans and foils the evil machinations of rotten orphanage director Miss Hannigan.
Evita, Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's musical biography of Evita Peron, who clawed her way from an Argentine gutter to the palace, makes its second tour with the Broadway Series. Stars are yet to be named.
Footloose has had good buzz since its early days in workshop last year. It's based on the 1984 movie hit starring Kevin Bacon (and featuring Cincinnati's Sarah Jessica Parker) about a city kid who moves to a town where dancing has been outlawed.
In Mickey-and-Judy style, the kids get together not to put on a show but to face off with the well-intentioned but oppressive town minister. Lots of Top 40 hits spun off from the original soundtrack, including the title song, "Let's Hear It for the Boy" and "Almost Paradise." Nine new songs are added, and Walter Bobbie, who helmed the smash hit revival of Chicago, directs.
'Last great musical'
Toni Tenille (without the Captain) plays both title roles in Victor - Victoria, another musical that started as a movie (1982). She plays a down-on-her-luck singer in 1930s Paris hired to headline in a cabaret as a man impersonating a woman. Romantic hijinks ensue. Music is by Leslie Bricusse and Henry Mancini.
Ragtime, based on E.L. Doctorow's epic novel, follows three families -- one upper-middle-class white, one Jewish socialist immigrant, one Harlem black -- through life at the turn-of-the-century. Fictional characters mix with history-makers including Henry Ford, Emma Goldman, Harry Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit. Encompassing tragedy and triumph, desire and disillusionment, passion and romance, innocence lost and freedom won, The New Yorker calls Ragtime "the last great musical of the century."
The score by Lynn Ahrens (lyrics) and University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music grad Stephen Flaherty (music) is considered to be the front-runner (ahead of The Lion King) for the 1998 Tony Award.
