Georgia Ensemble Theatre’s 26th season is bookended by musicals and includes Alfred Uhry’s celebrated comedy-drama Driving Miss Daisy.
The Roswell company’s five-show 2018/19 mainstage season opens Sept. 13 with 9 to 5 the Musical and closes April 28, 2019, with Bullets Over Broadway. It includes a four-show FamilyStage Series performed mostly on Saturdays and the Joe Gransden Big Band Series. Gransden’s dates will be announced on the GET website as they become available.
Georgia Ensemble is led by co-founder and producing artistic director Anita Allen-Farley, and performs in the 600-seat Roswell Cultural Arts Center.
Early-bird mainstage subscriptions ($90-$145) are available by phone only — at 770.641.1260 — through May 31. Prices go up June 1 ($100-$165); online subscriptions go on sale June 2 HERE. Single-show tickets ($29-$58) will go on sale later.
This summer, meanwhile, GET stages a concert version of Ring of Fire, The Music of Johnny Cash outdoors at the Chattahoochee Nature Center. It runs July 12-28, with pavilion table seating ($35) and lawn seating ($15). Details, tickets HERE or at 770.641.1260.
The new season lines up like this:
9 to 5 the Musical
SEPT. 13-30. Music and lyrics by Dolly Parton, script by Patricia Resnick. Friendship and revenge unite three working women in the stage version of the 1980 movie comedy. In addition to the title tune, Parton’s score features 16 other songs, including “Backwoods Barbie” and “Shine Like the Sun.” The musical had a four-month Broadway run in 2009 and featured Stephanie J. Block (Falsettos), Megan Hilty (TV’s “Smash”) and Allison Janney (TV’s “West Wing,” “Mom”) in the roles created onscreen by Jane Fonda, Parton and Lily Tomlin, respectively.
I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti
OCT. 25-NOV. 11. Script by Jacques Lamarre, based on the 2009 memoir with recipes of the same name by Giulia Melucci. From failure to fusilli, Spaghetti tells the story of Melucci, an Italian girl from Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge, and her search for Mr. Right. She found many Mr. Wrongs along her way, from an affectionate alcoholic and a classic New York City commitment-phobe, to a hipster past his sell date and a couple of novelists with Peter Pan complexes. Spaghetti may be made.
Moonlight & Magnolias
JAN. 10-27, 2019. Playwright Ron Hutchinson’s inside-Hollywood story peeks behind the camera as producer-screenwriter David O. Selznick, director Victor Fleming and screenwriter Ben Hecht lock themselves in an office with a five-day supply of peanuts and bananas to solve the near-disaster of Gone With the Wind. Described as a hilarious homage to the men behind a classic American movie.
Driving Miss Daisy
FEB. 28-MARCH 17, 2019. Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning American classic takes a fond but clear-eyed look at Atlanta life from 1948 to 1973, primarily through the eyes of Daisy Werthan, a retired and widowed Jewish schoolteacher, and her driver, an African-American chauffeur named Hoke Colburn. The piece was inspired by Uhry’s grandmother, Lena Fox, and her chauffeur, Will Coleman. It premiered off-Broadway in 1987, ran for three years, and had a limited Broadway run in 2010/11 with Vanessa Redgrave as Daisy and James Earl Jones as Hoke. The film version won the 1989 Academy Award for best picture. The GET staging is a tribute to co-founder Robert J. Farley, who created the Alliance Theatre production that ran two full seasons. Farley died in November at age 69.
Bullets Over Broadway
APRIL 11-28, 2019. This short-lived musical, which had a five-month Broadway run in 2014, is based on Woody Allen’s 1994 movie. It’s about a struggling writer who can finally get his play on Broadway — if he accepts mob funding and gives the boss’ girlfriend the lead role. The time is the Roaring 20s; the songs come from that era and include “Gee, Baby, Ain’t I Good to You,” “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll,” “They Go Wild, Simply Wild, Over Me” and “I’m Sitting on Top of the World.”
