HARTFORD, CONN.: Hartford Stage has announced a six-show 2015–16 season, its 52nd.
The season begins with world premiere of Christopher Shinn’s An Opening in Time, directed by Oliver Butler (Sept. 17–Oct. 11). The eight-character play follows a retired schoolteacher who returns to the much-changed Connecticut town she left years before. Hartford Stage previously produced Shinn’s Dying City.
Following that will be the world premiere of a new stage version of Rear Window (Oct. 22–Nov. 15), which playwright Keith Reddin has adapted from the short story by Cornell Woolrich that was also the basis the Hitchock film about a wheelchair-bound photographer who witnesses what he thinks is a murder in the building across from his apartment. Hartford Stage artistic director Darko Tresnjak will direct.
The holiday season will feature the theatre’s 18th annual production of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol—A Ghost Story of Christmas, directed by Maxwell Williams (Nov. 27–Dec. 26).
The new year will begin with The Body of an American by Dan O’Brien, directed by Jo Bonney (Jan 7–31, 2016), a play about O’Brien’s friendship with war photographer Paul Watson, who took a controversial 1993 photograph of a dead American soldier dragged through the streets of Mogadishu. The play is a coproduction with Primary Stages.
Following that will be William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, directed by Tresnjak (Feb. 11–March 6, 2016).
Next will be a revival of Emily Mann’s Having Our Say: The Delaney Sisters’ First 100 Years, directed by Jade King Carroll (March 31–April 24, 2016). Adapted from the book by Sarah L. Delany and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, the play follows two sisters from their childhood in the Jim Crow South through to the Harlem Renaissance. Having Our Say is a coproduction with Long Wharf Theatre.
The season will close with the world premiere of Anastasia, directed by Tresnjak (May 12–June 15, 2016). The production reunites Ragtime adapters Terrence McNally, Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty to retell the legend of the last of the Romanov family after 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. The new staging is described as being “inspired” by the 1997 animated film, which featured songs by Flaherty and Ahrens, and the 1956 film starring Ingrid Bergman, which was not a musical.
