His Girl Friday, Sideways Added to La Jolla Playhouse’s 2013-14 Season

The Tony Award-winning La Jolla Playhouse has added two shows to its 2013-14 season.

Tony Award nominee Christopher Ashley (Memphis) will direct His Girl Friday, an adaptation by Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winner John Guare (Six Degrees of Separation) of the classic Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur play The Front Page and the Howard Hawks film it inspired. The show revolves around a couple of journalists, who are jockeying for a scoop as a major story breaks in Chicago, even as they sort out their complicated romance.

The theater has also announced that three-time Tony winner Des McAnuff (Jersey Boys) will stage Rex Pickett’s Sideways, Based on his book and the film it inspired, the play looks at a couple of middle-aged buds as they trek across the Santa Ynez Valley wine country on one last blowout road trip before one of them is married.

Ashley, the theater’s artistic director, has received Tony nominations for his direction of The Rocky Horror Show and Memphis. He also directed the Broadway musicals Leap of Faith and Xanadu.

Guare has a Tony Award for his book for the musical Two Gentlemen of Verona and a Pulitzer for Six Degrees of Separation. Among his many other plays are The House of Blue Leaves, Landscape of the Body, and Four Baboons Adoring the Sun.

McAnuff has earned Tony Awards for his stagings of Big River, The Who’s Tommy, and Jersey Boys. Last season, he was represented on Broadway with Jesus Christ Superstar. In addition, he has served as artistic director of both La Jolla Playhouse, where he remains director emeritus, and at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.

Pickett’s other credits are the Oscar-winning short My Mother Dreams the Satan’s Disciples and the novel Vertical, published last year, a sequel to Sideways.