Uptown Players is begging for money again, but that’s good news because it means the return of Broadway Our Way. A star-studded night of local theater peeps combine their talents to bring an evening of fab showtunes, but with some major twists. Because we all know Uptown Players isn’t gonna play it straight — and that’s a good thing.
DEETS: Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd. Through May 15. $40. UptownPlayers.org.
On Tuesday night, Uptown Players hosted a nice turnout at the Kalita Humphreys Theater where they announced the roster for their 2011 season. They held off on announcing one production due to contractual reasons, but if it fits in with the rest, it should make quite a season — especially for the LGBT community. Joining Players producers Jeff Rane and Craig Lynch onstage was the cast of the upcoming show Closer to Heaven, the Pet Shop Boys musical which opens Oct. 1.
• Uptown Players will start the season with Thank You For Being a Friend, The Musical, a Golden Girls parody by Nick Brennan. Expect camp overdrive as the “women” aren’t too thrilled about a certain gay celebrity moving in next door. Who knew Lance Bass could be such a problem? The show runs Feb. 4–27 at the Rose Room inside Station 4.
• As part of the upcoming Foote Festival celebrating playwright Horton Foote, Uptown Players joins in with the regional premiere of his Pulitzer prize winning play, Young Man from Atlanta. The show runs April 1–17 at the Kalita.
• UP brings back Broadway Our Way in which local actors switch-hit showtunes. Men sing the women’s parts, vice versa and it’s a gay ol’ time. BOW runs May 6–15.
• The Twilight Zone theme played when they didn‘t announce their next show, which will run June 10–July 2. We know it’s a musical at least, but the official announcement will be made Feb.1.
• Victor/Victoria, the musical based on the Julie Andrews/James Garner 1982 film, will run July 29–Aug. 2.
• Personally, I thought their announcement of the Dallas Pride Performing Arts Festival was the most exciting. The fest will feature cabaret sets, performances and plays with the musical Crazy, Just Like Me by Louis Sacco and Drew Gasparini as the centerpiece. The fest coincides with Dallas Pride and runs Sep. 9–17. The full schedule will also be announced Feb. 1.
• Finishing off the season will be The Temperamentals, a new play by Jon Marans which opened this year off-Broadway. The site notes that the play “‘tells the story of two men – the communist Harry Hay and the Viennese refugee and designer Rudi Gernreich — as they fall in love while building the first gay rights organization in the pre-Stonewall United States.”
Musical theater is getting snarky
In Uptown Players’ Forbidden Broadway, Gerard Alessandrini has written a revue that pokes fun at our favorite musicals. We’d normally deem this sacrilege, if it didn’t sound so funny. Rent, Les Misérables, Fiddler on the Roof all get a sassy redux in this new show directed by B.J. Cleveland.
DEETS: Kalita Humphreys Theater, 3636 Turtle Creek Blvd.2 p.m. $30–$40. UptownPlayers.org.
When the Dallas Theater Center left the Kalita Humphreys Theater in the heart of gay Uptown for its Downtown digs at the new Wyly Theatre, it freed up the historically-protected venue up to other theater companies. Gay-centric Uptown Players was the first to jump at the opening, planning three shows — its fundraiser, Broadway Our Way, and its first two full-length shows, the play Equus (which just closed, breaking attendance records for Uptown Players) and the upcoming Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (it opens April 13). After that, Uptown was headed back to its old digs at the KD Theatre.
Not so fast.
Uptown Players had already moved a lot of its operations — office space and box office operations — to the Kalita. But they have just inked an agreement to stay at the Kalita for the remainder of its 2010 season. That means Regrets Only, Forbidden Broadway’s Greatest Hits and Closer to Heaven will all debut at the Kalita, which has three times as many seats as KD at its most generous configuration.
And it seems to be working. Folks who wouldn’t dream of going to “alternative” performance spaces are lining up to return to the Kalita, an ageing but eye-catching theater designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
“We feel it is now time to make the step into a larger facility that will allow us room for growth and bigger and more complex productions,” says co-founder Craig Lynch.
And the North Texas theater scene gets just a little gayer.
Uptown Players is mounting — no pun intended — a new production of Equus at the Kalita Humphreys Theater starting later this month, following a successful run on Broadway and London’s West End featuring Daniel Radcliffe as a troubled boy. I attended a photoshoot last night for an upcoming story previewing the show, and got this exclusive pic of two of the stars: Max Swarmer as Alan and Daylon Walton as one of the horses he blinds with a spike.
