This review aired on KBAQ March 28, 2016

THREE MAJOR LOCAL THEATERS ANNOUNCE 2016/17 SEASONS

It’s March and the annual theater season announcements have started with the three biggest local theater companies revealing their 2016/17 season picks.

ASU Gammage’s Broadway season includes seven shows plus three optional attractions.  While the season includes four recent Broadway musicals, two musical revivals, and a play, several current Broadway hits that tour during the season will not play here.  Two of the optional attractions are popular musicals that have previously played here plus a magic show that doesn’t qualify as a Broadway show.

The recent Broadway musicals include “Beautiful,” the Carole King musical that tells her story using several of the composer’s tunes, “Matilda,” the London musical based on the Roald Dahl children’s novel, “Finding Neverland,” that provides the background on author J. M. Barrie’s creation Peter Pan, and “An American In Paris” based on the 1951 film musical with George and Ira Gershwin’s score.  Broadway’s 2015 Tony Award winning Best Play, “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time,” marks the return of a non-musical on the local Broadway season.  It traces a boy wrongly accused of killing a dog.  When he decides to name the real killer, the revelation changes his life.  The two revivals include “Cabaret” and “The Sound of Music.”

Although several more recent Broadway shows begin their nationwide tours next season, Tempe won’t see these shows.  Two huge current Broadway hits, “Hamilton” and “Fun Home,” are promised during the following season but no promises have been made for the current Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I” or the musical spoof “Something’s Rotten,” that are on several Broadway seasons throughout the country.  The musical “Fun Home” traces a young girl’s look into her past to describe the man who defined her family, and “Hamilton” tells with a hip-hop score about Alexander Hamilton’s place in America’s creation.  For ASU Gammage season tickets, call the ASU Gammage/Ticketmaster box office at 800-982-2787 or order online at www.asugammage.com.

Phoenix Theatre, the city’s leading musical theater producer, announced an eight show season that includes six musicals and two plays.  The musicals include “In the Heights,” “Billy Elliot,” “Bullets Over Broadway,” and “Beehive” and the plays are “Twist Your Dickens,” another holiday show using the familiar story and “Baskerville,” a new Ken Ludwig comedy about a Sherlock Holmes solved mystery.  “Liberace!” promises to introduce audiences to “the man behind the grand.”   One show, announced as a recent musical, will be revealed soon.  For Phoenix Theatre season tickets, call the Phoenix Theatre box office at 602-254-2151 or order online at www.phoenixtheatre.com.

Arizona Theatre Company’s six show season includes two recent Broadway hit plays, “King Charles III” and “An Act of God,” two musicals, “Fiddler on the Roof” and the Johnny Cash tribute “Ring of Fire,” a world premiere ATC commissioned mystery, “Holmes and Watson,” and the 2016 National Latino Playwriting Award winner, “The River Bride.”  For Arizona Theatre Company season tickets, call the Arizona Theatre Company box office at 602-252-8497 or order online at www.arizonatheatre.org.