Las Vegas Spotlight: August 2006
This is the slowest month for Las Vegas theater in quite some time, with only one major production opening. That would be the Super Summer Theatre’s third offering, the beloved musical comedy Bells Are Ringing (August 9-26), which is being presented by Las Vegas Little Theatre. First seen on Broadway in 1956, starring the incomparable Judy Holliday, this delightful Jule Styne-Betty Comden-Adolph Green musical tells the story of phone operator Ella Peterson, who is secretly in love with one of her clients.
Speaking of Las Vegas Little Theatre, the company’s mainstage season is going to feature a healthy mix of fare next season, including Ken Ludwig’s farce Lend Me a Tenor and Neil Simon’s Jake’s Women. Also on tap are Five Women Wearing the Same Dress, by acclaimed American Beauty and Six Feet Under writer Alan Ball, and Steven Dietz’s marital drama Fiction. LVLT’s Fischer Black Box season starts off with Bent, Martin Sherman’s controversial play about the Nazi persecution of homosexuals, followed by David Ives’ Polish Joke, Richard Greenberg’s Eastern Standard, and then finishing up with Frozen, Bryony Lavery’s chilling look into the disturbed mind of a child killer.
Speaking of the new season, Stage Door Entertainment has announced that LVLT’s black box space will be its new home. Once again, Stage Door’s season will make fans of contemporary musical theater drool with Jason Robert Brown’s two-hander The Last Five Years, Rent creator Jonathan Larson’s Tick, tick … BOOM!, as well as Ragtime and Pippin. Stage Door’s only straight play of the season will be David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning drama Proof.
“Second chances” is the theme for the Theatre in the Valley‘s 2006-2007 season, which opens with Sheldon Harnick, Jerry Bock, and Joe Masteroff’s endearing and tuneful musical She Loves Me. Also included will be Second Summer, Wally’s Cafe, and a double bill of one-acts from Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, whose plays The Dumb Waiter and The Real Inspector Hound will be presented.
The mission of the Nevada Conservatory Theatre at UNLV is to bring “the highest quality theater by featuring professional artists and advanced students recruited from around the country,” and NCT can always be counted on for fine productions of classics. Their upcoming season includes Twelfth Night, Mother Courage and Her Children, and The Glass Menagerie. In addition, Noel Coward’s Private Lives and Clark Gesner’s You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown have also been thrown in to shake things up a bit. NCT’s more experimental Second Season begins with the searing documentary piece The Laramie Project, continues with The Book of Nights and Click-Boom, and then concludes with the winner of the Morton R. Sarett National Playwriting Competition.
