KANSAS CITY, MO.: Kansas City Repertory Theatre has announced its 2019-20 season, with plays and musicals slated for its two venues, Spencer Theatre and Copaken Stage.
“I am proud and excited to present a season…offering a balance of modern classics viewed through a fresh new lens, the intense and daring storytelling of our New Works Festival, and a much-needed escape from our day-to-day lives,” said Jason Chanos, interim artistic director, in a statement. Chanos is filling in while a replacement for departed artistic director Eric Rosen is being sought.
The season kicks off with Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Sept. 6-29), directed by Lisa Rothe. This classic depicts a Southern family celebrating the 65th birthday of their patriarch, as secrets and lies among the gatherers are revealed.
Next is Ntozake Shange‘s For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf (Oct. 18-Nov. 10). Shange’s seminal and treasured work presents seven African American women, each identified solely by a color, who traverse class, gender, sexuality, and geography in an intensely personal “choreo-poem.”
The season favorite A Christmas Carol follows (Nov. 22-Dec. 29), with direction by Jason Chanos. This is KCRep’s 39th time around with this holiday classic.
The new year begins with Lisa Kron and Jeanine Tesori’s Tony-winning musical Fun Home (Jan. 24-Feb. 16, 2020). Based on the graphic novel by Alison Bechdel, this show tells the story of a budding young artist and her relationship with the volatile, brilliant, man whose temperament and secrets defined her family and life: her father.
Next is the theatre’s new works festival, OriginKC, which will feature two productions in repertory (March 6-April 5, 2020). These include a new adaptation of Frankenstein by Kyle Hatley, in which a storyteller and a live musician unravel Mary Shelley’s haunting and heartbreaking cautionary tale, and Legacy Land, a play by Stacey Rose about a 42-year-old recluse, her barely legal lover, and another volatile couple confined by a freak Thanksgiving weekend blizzard and forced to face their demons.
The season concludes with Michael Frayn’s Noises Off (March 27-April 19), the classic backstage farce about a British theatre tour gone hilariously awry.
Founded in 1964 by Patricia McIlrath, Kansas City Repertory Theatre, the professional theatre in residence at UMKC, is nationally known as an incubator of new plays and producer of innovative musicals and reimagined classics.
