Announcing the 2012-2013 Season!

 On Tuesday, March 13, the Bohemian Theatre Ensemble gathered at COOPER'S CHICAGO to celebrate the announcement of the 2012-2013 Season. With the announcement now official, and the pizza put away, we wanted to share our announcement with our online community. Keep your eyes on BoHo Theatre's website as more information about the coming season will be posted soon!

BoHo Theatre strives to examine how love, truth, beauty and freedom thrive in our everyday lives. Focusing on the larger events to the everyday regularities, our stories focus on these four pillars.

They are seemingly simple, yet so wonderfully complex. 

And now...The 2012-2013 Season (listed in order of production):

Ordinary Days - LOVE

Music and Lyrics by Adam Gwon

Ordinary Days is a perfect example of searching for something so simple in a world so complex.

 

The story is about 4 people struggling to connect; searching for fulfillment, happiness, beauty, love, friendship and simplicity in an overly complex, confusing and often impersonal world.  The production centers on two couples – one dealing with their past in order to find love in the present, the other an unlikely pair of companions lost in the complexity of the everyday searching for a simple story they can share.  All come to find that the pieces of our lives, as jumbled as they may seem, do fit together (even if it doesn’t feel that way sometimes). 

 

Funny, charming, witty, with a huge heart…  and a lot of LOVE…

Pygmalion – Beauty

By George Bernard Shaw

The production will be directed by Stage Left Artistic Director Vance Smith, and BoHo Theatre's Peter Robel acting as Associate Director.

This co-production with Stage Left will explore the bohemian themes of identity and perception of BEAUTY. As Eliza suggests, the difference between a lady and a flower girl lies not in how she looks or speaks, but rather in how she is treated. Shaw asks us to examine how each of us perceives BEAUTY in our lives -- not simply in the conventional, but also in the ordinary and mundane. This openness to discovery and appreciation allows beauty to flourish, where it otherwise might never have been revealed.

This is an extremely exciting opportunity to join with venerable Chicago theatre company Stage Left theatre to mount this as a co-production. This will allow both companies to pool our talents and resources to tell this story in our unique way on the 100th anniversary of the first production in Vienna.

 

Hauptmann - TRUTH

John Logan

March 1, 1932: a 20 month old toddler was abducted from his home in New Jersey.  Two months later his body was discovered a short distance from his home. Cause of death? A massive skull fracture. 

 

After an investigation that lasted two years, a suspect was arrested and charged, and the “Trial of the Century” was held in 1935. That trial found Bruno Richard Hauptmann guilty of the murder in the first degree of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr and was executed in 1936.  Hauptmann proclaimed his innocence till the end. 

 

Whether or not Hauptmann was guilty of the so-called crime of the century, one verdict is clear from the play: his trial was a disservice to the judicial system.

 

BoHo Theatre's production doesn't seek to answer the question of innocence or guilt, but looks at the trial of the century in a personal and theatrical way.  As Hauptmann retlls his story, the guards turn into characters, allowing the audience to relive the critical moments. Hauptmann is a dark investigation of TRUTH.

Kiss of the Spiderwoman - FREEDOM

Music and Lyrics by Kander and Ebb

Book by Terrence McNally

 

Winning the 1993 Tony Award for Best Musical, our final show explores the question: What happens when a gay window dresser and a straight Marxist guerrilla are thrown together in jail?

 

The lead character, Molina, lives in a fantasy world in order to flee the reality of torture, fear and humiliation, and Valentin is happy to introduce this fantasy world to his new cellmate, a revolutionary that’s a key to eliminating a political terrorist threat to the state.  The only part of his fantasy world that scares him is the presence of the spider woman, who kills with a kiss. 

 

Playing with the contrast between the gritty reality of police-state torture and the beautiful fantasy world Molina creates, Kiss of the Spiderwoman is all about FREEDOM. 

 

From the obvious desire to be free from prison, to the more complex ideas of freedom from a reality that’s immersed in political and social strife, and freedom of personal identity, Kiss is theatrical, comedic, charming, and brutal.  It is, as the NY Times says, “the story of an uncloseted, unhomogenized, unexceptional gay man who arrives at his own heroic definition of masculinity.” 

 

Thank you to everyone who came out to support BoHo Theatre! We look forward to welcoming you next season.