Northern Arizona University
2008-2009 Catalogue

The Fantastics
by Tom Jones aned Harvey Schmidt

"This romantic charmer is still the longest-running musical in the world. Filled with breathtaking poetry, it is pure and simple and transcends all cultural barriers."
http://www.artsopolis.com/event/detail/35971

"This slower, mellower, gentler world where young people had time to dream but also had a way of life to which they could return is at the heart of The Fantasticks' enduring charm. In a delightful twist on an even longer-lasting tale, Romeo and Juliet, bookwriter and lyricist Jones created a spoof (two fathers who invent Montague-Capulet style feud as a ruse to get their children, Matt and Luisa, married) that lent itself perfectly to a spectrum of story telling techniques -- verse with heavy doses of rhyme and nature metaphors (again inspired by Shakespeare), the presentational style in which a narrator moves the story forward, the commedia del arte platform and its play-within-a- play actors."
http://www.curtainup.com/fantasticks.html


Twelfth Night
by William Shakespeare

"Like his early comedies, The Comedy of Errors or The Taming of the Shrew for instance, Twelfth Night is essentially a celebration of romantic love and can be viewed as a traditional romantic comedy. The play has many of the elements common to Elizabethan romantic comedy, including the devices of mistaken identity, separated twins, and gender-crossing disguise, and its plot revolves around overcoming obstacles to "true" love."
http://www.enotes.com/twelfth/

"Twelfth Night is a comedic classic by William Shakespeare that centers upon the misadventures of the Countess Olivia who is in love with Cesario, the servant of Orsino, the Duke of Illyria. This Elizabethan soap opera is further complicated by the fact that Duke Orsino is in love with Olivia, and Cesario is really a woman named Viola, who disguised herself as a man after being shipwrecked on the shore of Illyria."
http://www.largeprintreviews.com/12night.html

The Importance of Being Earnest
by Oscar Wilde

"The Importance of Being Earnest is a tour de force of comedy, misidentifications, and farce. Algernon and Jack are friends, and each has invented an imaginary person as an excuse of getting out of engagements. Jack's person is Ernest, a brother with a wild past. The two conspire to woo the ladies that they love, and through a series of happenstances, must gently deceive to get want they want. The end result is a play of uncomperable quality, chock full of witticisms that are highly quotable out of context. In fact, I dare suggest the entire play is quotable, such its brilliance. "
http://www.amazon.com/Importance-Being-Earnest-Oscar-Wilde/dp/158049580X

"Set in England during the late Victorian era, the play's humour derives in part from characters maintaining fictitious identities to escape unwelcome social obligations. It is replete with witty dialogue and satirizes some of the foibles and hypocrisy of late Victorian society. It has proved Wilde's most enduringly popular play."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Importance_of_Being_Earnest

The Little Dog Laughed
Douglas Carter Beane

"The play pulls no punches and hits the hypocrisy of Hollywood square on the head."
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2008/12/02/103902.php


"The Little Dog Takes Its Laughs to BroadwayThe Broadway opening of this Off-Broadway hit of last season is perched in time roughly halfway between the official confirmation that Neil Patrick Harris is gay (one of show business's worst kept secrets) and the impending wedding of Tom Cruise (surely its most enduring source of sexual orientation gossip). What we don't see, of course, is the relentless "handling" that goes on behind the scenes of these "stories," to keep our inexplicable curiosity at bay."
http://www.curtainup.com/littledoglaughed.html

The Bald Soprano and The Lesson
by Eugene Ionesco

"Eugène Ionesco intended The Lesson as a brutal criticism on Nazi fascism invading the peaceful hearts and minds of the people in his homeland, Romania. We twist the text to show how the world goes wrong today: A sense of tradition, honour, and respect is being replaced by capitalist greed and consumer righteousness… An elegantly subtle touch to a brutal script."
http://www.reviewsgate.com/index.php?name=News&file=article&sid=3591

Drama in 11 scenes by Eugene Ionesco, who called it an "antiplay." It was first produced in 1950 and published in 1954 as La Cantatrice chauve; the title is also translated The Bald Prima Donna. The play, an important example of the Theater of the Absurd, consists mainly of a series of meaningless conversations between two couples that eventually deteriorate into babbling.
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Plays-Soprano-Lesson-Submission/dp/0802130798

University of Missouri at Kansas City
2008-2009 Season


The Heidi Chronicles
by Wendy Wasserstein

"Wasserstein has made the cultural territory of the American experience since the 1960s her own. She is its most articulate theatrical chronicler. This collection of her recent work, Uncommon Women and Others, Isn't It Romantic, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Heidi Chronicles, traces that experience through three decades of changing styles, mores, life objectives, and intellectual challenges. She examines her characters and their times with great good humor, complexity, depth of feeling, and a firm refusal to accept trite and easy images. She writes the truth about people and their lives without blinking. She teaches us all what it was like to live through a period of great turmoil and confusion."
http://www.amazon.com/Heidi-Chronicles-Uncommon-Others-Romantic/dp/0679734996

"In a series of interrelated scenes, The Heidi Chronicles traces the coming of age of Heidi Holland, a successful art historian, who comes to learn that liberation can be achieved only if one is true to oneself. Wendy Wasserstein's play was the winner of both the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play."
http://www.goldstar.com/events/washington-dc/the-heidi-chronicles-1.html

Tartuffe
by Moliere

"Molière’s comedy is founded on the gloss of human appearances, on the slippery gaps between how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. In his own time, his relentless satirical attacks on the hypocrisies and vulgarities of the elite made his plays immensely popular, and also caused them to be banned for offending against religion."
http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2008/02/review-tartuffe.html


Orgon has welcomed the scoundrel into his home and then encouraged him in his subversion of his family and its values. For Orgon, Tartuffe can do no wrong, and all proof of his misconduct is considered blasphemy, until the husband is faced foursquare with the truth and his own imminent cuckoldry. As Mr. Bamman plays him, Orgon is not simply an old fool but the sincerest of acolytes totally overcome by guru worship.
http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=9E0CE5D9103FF935A25753C1A964958260

Five by Tenn
by Tennessee Williams

"SpeakEasy’s FIVE BY TENN showcases five (six, really) of Tennessee Williams’ little-known one-act plays, some never published nor performed in his lifetime, arranged and directed by Scott Edmiston as a biography of the poet-playwright from youth to old age, focusing on Mr. Williams’s Chekhovian side rather than the hothouse world that “Tennessee Williams” evokes."
http://www.theatermirror.com/CR5x10speakeasy.htm

Not all of Tennessee Williams’s unpublished or forgotten playlets deserve staging. Five by Tenn comprises four of the former and one of the latter. The melodramatic opener, Summer at the Lake (1937), about an exasperating mother and miserable son, and the maudlin closer, I Can’t Imagine Tomorrow (1970), could well be jettisoned.
http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=7069998630795694134&postID=3624841421885571190

Our Town
by Thorton Wilder

Our Town is all about life and people living in Grover's Corners, New Hampshire. Throughout the three-part play, we learn details about the town, the families and individuals who live there, love and marriage, and life and death.
http://www.viloria.com/viloria/angel/20010307-ourtown.html

"Wilder wasn't bashful about revealing his own high opinion of ''Our Town.'' Late in Act I, the play's narrator, the ubiquitous Stage Manager, tells the audience that he will leave the script in the cornerstone of a new bank, so that people ''a thousand years from now'' can see ''the way we were: in our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying."
http://theater2.nytimes.com/mem/theater/treview.html?res=940DE5DF1138F936A35751C1A96E948260

Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens

"In perhaps Dickens's greatest novel, an orphan named Pip grows up in harsh conditions, does a good turn for an escaped convict (as much out of fear as charity), then finds himself steadily climbing the socioeconomic ladder -- enjoying "great expectations" -- with the help of an unknown benefactor."
http://www.allreaders.com/Topics/Info_1937.asp

"A boy called Pip, who has a chance encounter with an escaped convict, is given into service of the ancient Miss Havisham, and comes into some great expectations which change his life for ever."
http://www.clareswindlehurst.com/bookreviews/2008/09/30/book-review-great-expectations-by-charles-dickens/