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New Line goes old, new and bizarre in 2008-09 season
(by Kara Krekeler - August 27, 2008)
After bouncing around between a few different venues over the last few years, New Line Theatre is ready to open its 18th season at Washington University’s South Campus Theatre with a six-week run of Hair. Formerly Christian Brothers Collegiate High School, the South Campus Theatre is located at 6501 Clayton Road.
New Line last performed Hair in 2001 and considering everything that has happened to the country since that last staging — including the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the fact that the presidential election will be historic in one way or another — New Line Artistic Director Scott Miller thought it was high time his company produced Hair again.
“I’m a news junkie, and I kept hearing all the news pundits talking about how this year’s election is just like 1968. I realized we had to open our season with [Hair],” he said. “All the problems of 1968 are still with us. There are huge issues with race, drugs, corruption, poverty … look at what was going on 40 years ago, and we still haven’t fixed it.”
Written by Gerome Ragni and James Rado, the provocative Hair deals with the late-’60s issues of drugs, free love, corrupt politics and plenty of rock and roll. Miller said that since his company last produced the play, he’s written a book about the musical and two documentaries have come out about it, events that he feels make the “incredibly strange” musical more accessible both to its actors and its audience.
“I understand it now on a far deeper level, and I think it will be more powerful now,” Miller said. “It’s a very silly, weird, funny script, but I think this will be deeper and more intense than last time.”
Hair will run Sept. 11 through Oct. 18, with one notable exception: On Oct. 2, the house will be dark due to the vice presidential debate that will take place at Washington University that night. Miller said that while the debate will take place at the university’s main campus, security for the vice presidential candidates will be positioned at the South Campus location and requires that there are as few outsiders present as possible.
“The building is owned by Wash. U., but it’s not used very much,” Miller said. Aside from the Washington University sports teams using the fields for practice, and the university renting a few rooms to Fontbonne, the South Campus building is used solely by New Line and the Clayton Community Theatre. “I really think this is an unusual circumstance.”
And for the rest of the season, that looks to be the case; as far as Miller knows, none of New Lines other full productions will be interrupted by the university.
For its second full show, New Line will present Return to the Forbidden Planet April 30 through May 23, 2009. Billed as “Shakespeare’s forgotten rock-and-roll masterpiece,” the outlandish comedy combines Shakespeare’s The Tempest with the seemingly incongruent elements of rock-and-roll classics and the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, which takes place on a spaceship.
The musical is based equally on The Tempest and Forbidden Planet, which is itself based on Shakespeare’s play. The characters, some of which are named after characters in the play and others from the movie, speak only Elizabethan English while singing classic American rock songs, including “Born to Be Wild,” “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Pretty Woman.”
“It’s utterly bizarre. It’s all these elements that should never go together,” Miller said of the Bob Carlton musical. “I had heard of it a few years ago, but I didn’t really know anything about it. Then I got the CD and I couldn’t stop laughing, and I realized we had to do it. This is the kind of show that only New Line would do in St. Louis.
“I’m a little scared of it, but I think it’s going to be one of those shows that feels like it will be a really wild, crazy party every night.”
The final show of the 2008-09 season is The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which is scheduled to run July 16 through Aug. 8, 2009. While the touring production of the Broadway-hit musical visited the Fox Theatre more than a year ago, Miller said that he thinks the show will play much better on a smaller stage.
“I think it’s a show that doesn’t work too great in a giant house. It needs to be an intimate experience,” he said. “Hopefully, it will be a lot cooler and deeper in a small setting like we have.”
Spelling Bee puts audiences inside a children’s spelling contest in which all of the contestants are “grappling with social issues,” Miller said, adding that while the show is funny on the surface, there are several subplots that reveal “the ills of contemporary society.”
“It’s about the worst [characteristics] of Americans,” he said. “It’s not really about kids [who are played by adult actors]; it’s about adults.”
In addition to its usual politically charged season of musicals, New Line will also offer a two-night cabaret Jan. 5 and 6, 2009 at the Sheldon Concert Hall. The fourth in an occasional series, this season’s event is titled A New Line Cabaret, Episode IV: Night of the Living Show Tunes and will feature songs from Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Avenue Q, Sweet Charity and Johnny Appleweed, among others.
“We wanted to dispel the myth that all musical theater is Rodgers and Hammerstein. We try to do things that are more adult and more intense,” Miller said. “It’s a fun thing to do, but it’s enough work that we can’t do it every year.”
The concert is part of the Sheldon Notes From Home series and will start at 8 p.m. Jan. 5 and 6. The remainder of the season runs Wednesday through Saturday evenings, with each show beginning at 8 p.m. For more information about New Line’s season, visit www.newlinetheatre.com. For tickets call 534-1111.
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