SAN FRANCISCO: Custom Made Theatre Company has announced the six shows of the 2017-18 season, its 19th. Dates will be announced later.
First up will be Paula Vogel’s Pulitzer Prize-winning How I Learned to Drive, which follows a troubled relationship between a young woman and her uncle over the years, using driving as a metaphor to explore darker themes.
Next up will be James Goldman’s The Lion in Winter, about King Henry II and his wife Eleanor and the conflicts that emerge among the royal family over Christmas.
The Man of La Mancha, with book by Dale Wasserman, lyrics by Joe Darion, and music by Mitch Leigh, will be next. Loosely adapted from Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote, the musical imagines the story as a play within a play, as Cervantes takes the role of his lead character, a knight awaiting a hearing with the Spanish Inquisition.
Following will be the West Coast premiere of Hooded, or Being Black for Dummies, by Tearrance Arvelle Chisholm. The play follows the relationship between two boys, one a good student at prep school and the other doing time in prison. The show will be a coproduction with Playwrights Foundation.
Next up Custom Made will coproduce Tinderella: the Modern Musical with FaultLine Theatre. With music by Christian B. Schmidt, lyrics by Weston Scott, and book by Rose Oser, the show reimagines Cinderella for the age of online dating.
The final show will be the world premiere of Jonathan Spector’s Good. Better. Best. Bested. Coproduced with Spector’s Just Theatre, the play asks the question, if the world were about to end during your Vegas vacation, would you cut it short?
Founded in 1998, Custom Made Theatre Company aims to produce socially relevant plays that are intimate theatrical experiences.
