Season subscriptions are available with reduced rates for Ithaca College faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Call 607-274-3224 for details. Season subscriptions are available with reduced rates for Ithaca College faculty, staff, students, and alumni. Call 607-274-3224 for details.
Ithaca College Theatre takes to the stage once again to present the 2008–9 season of comedies, dramas, musicals, and opera. This challenging and entertaining season features superb student talent under the direction of the renowned IC faculty and staff.
The season opens in October with Metamorphoses, Mary Zimmerman's groundbreaking and Tony Award–winning reinterpretation of Ovid's narrative poem. Metamorphoses unifies the powers of myth, ritual, love, and loss by exploring the meaning of transformation through the use of a pool of water -- turning it into an ocean of the imagination.
A wild and passionate pair of 1920's vaudevillians, Queenie and Burrs, throw The Wild Party to put some fire back into their relationship. This party sizzles and pops as their guests arrive: a prizefighter, a hooker, a theater producer, the flamboyant and incestuous d'Armano brothers, and other sordid creatures of the night. Fueled by Prohibition booze and cocaine, the party gets ugly as the two lovers test each other’s limits. The Wild Party -- featuring music, lyrics, and book by Andrew Lippa -- is intended for mature audiences only.
After attending a conference about the death penalty and listening to stories about wrongful convictions and confessions gained via torture, threats, and deception, authors Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen interviewed exonorees throughout the U.S. and adapted the stories of six of them into The Exonerated. This powerful drama recounts stories of brutality and degradation, while telling a story of the triumph of the human spirit amid broken systems. The Exonerated is not included in season subscription packages; single tickets will be available for purchase.
Guest director David Lefkowich returns once again to helm two French operas, Cendrillon (Cinderella) by Pauline Viardot and L'Enfant et les Sortilèges (The Child and the Wild) by Maurice Ravel. These two one-act operas, written in the early twentieth century, make adult visits to the childhood realms of magic and fairy tales. Viardot retells the Cinderella story of the transformation and promise awaiting a good girl; the inanimate world comes to life to haunt a rude boy in Ravel's piece. Cendrillon will be semistaged.
When composer William Finn was hospitalized for a dangerous hemorrhaging in the brain, he confronted his worst fear: dying with his greatest songs still inside of him. From his hospital bed and during his recovery, he wrote the witty and acerbic music to A New Brain, turning a new appreciation of love and life into song. Finn cowrote the book with James Lapine.
The season closes in April with Tartuffe -- set in 1840's New Orleans, where Creole culture flavors the French of Molière's raucous comedy. Tartuffe, a con artist posing as a religious zealot, hoodwinks Orgon, the patriarch of a well-to-do family, into giving him all of his family's assets, including his daughter's hand in marriage. But Tartuffe's considerable theatrics cannot mask the fraudulent means he uses to retain his advantage. Once his chicanery is exposed, the family unites to defeat this imposter once and for all.
Season subscriptions are available for as little as $25. Subscribers enjoy benefits such as ticket exchange and guaranteed seats to our season's hottest shows. For more information and to receive a season brochure, call 607-274-3224, e-mail [mailto:tam@ithaca.edu], or visit the IC Theatre website.
IC Theatre Website
https://www.ithaca.edu/intercom/article.php/20080624143259260