Williamstown Theatre Festival Announces 2007 Season

The Williamstown Theatre Festival has announced its 2007 season, which will feature productions of 10 works on three stages, including the newly opened Center Stage black box theater.

The season will begin with Tony Award winner B.D. Wong in a rare revival of the musical Herringbone, to be presented on the Center Stage, June 14-24. The one-man, multi-character musical has a book by Tom Cone, music by Skip Kennon, and lyrics by Ellen Fitzhugh. It will be directed by Roger Rees, WTF’s artistic director. The show recounts the childhood of a vaudeville wunderkind after he is possessed by the angry spirit of a toe-tapping midget. “I’m very excited to be doing it,” says Wong. “It’s one of the first plays I saw when I moved to New York City.”

Another highlight of the season will be the Main Stage production of Emlyn Williams’ classic drama The Corn is Green, directed by Nicholas Martin (August 1-12). Kate Burton, the wife of former Festival artistic director Michael Ritchie, returns to Williamstown to star as Miss Moffat, a strong-willed Welsh schoolteacher working in a small poverty-stricken coal mining town. The role of the illiterate teenager Morgan Evans, whom Miss Moffatt helps transform from a bully to a brilliant student, will be played by Burton and Ritchie’s 18-year-old son Morgan Ritchie (who also happens to be the grandson of Richard Burton).

The Festival’s other musical offering will be Party Come Here, with a book by Daniel Goldfarb and a score by David Kirshenbaum; it will be directed by Christopher Ashley and presented on the mid-size Nikos Stage, August 8-19. The show, which was produced at last year’s New York Musical Theatre Festival, concerns a nervous groom, a statue of Christ, and a 500 year-old Jewish caveman who converge to make miracles happen during a tropical storm on one magical night in Rio. The authors are in the midst of doing rewrites. No casting has been announced, but Ashley says he is “very fond” of the NYMF cast, which included Hunter Foster, Kaitlin Hopkins, and Fyvush Finkel.

In addition to the 10 main productions, one of which is yet to be determined, the Festival will offer a Monday night series of readings and special performances including George Bernard Shaw’s Don Juan in Hell and Rees’ one-man show What You Will — An Evening By and About the Bard, as well as its popular late-night cabarets (July 5-7, August 9-11) and its “Fridays@3” reading series.

The other announced offerings are as follows. Tickets for all performances will be available by mail in April; the box office and phones will open in June. For additional information, visit wtfestival.org.

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Dissonance, by Damian Lanigan; directed by Amanda Charlton
(June 27-28, Nikos Stage)
Members of the Bradley String Quartet have their artistic differences. How will they be resolved when one of rock and roll’s biggest stars enters their world?

The Front Page, by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur; director TBA
(July 4-15, Main Stage)
Concocted criminal charges, wily politicians, love nests, and the daily grind of creating and selling newspapers are all in a day’s work in this classic Broadway comedy set in a Chicago newsroom.

Villa America, written and directed by Crispin Whitell
(July 11-22, Nikos Stage)
Gerald and Sara Murphy were at the center of the circle of artists, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Pablo Picasso, who migrated to France in the 1920s. Set on the sun-soaked coast of the French Riviera, this new play commissioned by the Festival explores the lives, loves and losses of what Gertrude Stein called “the Lost Generation.”

The Autumn Garden, by Lillian Hellman; directed by David Jones

(July 18-29, Main Stage)
At a summer resort on the Gulf of Mexico in 1949, seven friends confronting middle age assess the choices they have made and are about to make.

Crimes of the Heart, by Beth Henley; directed by Kathleen Turner
(July 25-August 5, Nikos Stage)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this dramatic comedy takes us into the lives of the Magrath sisters. Past resentments bubble to the surface as they are forced to deal with assorted relatives and past relationships while coping with the latest incident to disrupt their lives.

The Physicists, by Friedrich Dürrenmatt, translated by James Kirkup; directed by Kevin O’Rourke; presented in association with the Williams College Summer Theatre Lab
(August 7-18, Center Stage)
Three inmates at the Cherry Trees sanatorium believe themselves to be the world famous physicists Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton, and Johann Mobius. But are they indeed insane? This 1962 comedy examines the impact of nuclear science on global power and the moral tolls of sanity.