Tagged: theater

Louisville's CenterStage theater company continues its season this week with the regional premiere of the acclaimed rock musical “Next to Normal.” The show explores the impact of mental illness on a suburban family.

Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt’s “Next to Normal” opened on Broadway in 2009 and won three Tony Awards, but when it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010, it joined the ranks of only a handful of musicals to earn that distinction.

The Bard’s Town Theatre broadens its focus this season with an outstanding production of Samuel D. Hunter’s “A Bright New Boise.” This tightly-wound family drama about a disgraced evangelical who takes a job at an Idaho Hobby Lobby won an Obie Award in 2011 and has enjoyed a number of exciting regional premieres over the last season by companies like Washington, D.C.’s Wooly Mammoth Theatre and Chicago’s LiveWire.

Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing” is one of the original romantic comedies, full of tropes you don’t have to be a Bard scholar to recognize: the bickering twosome who fight their mutual attraction until finally succumbing to each other’s unlikely charms, the tragic misunderstanding that derails a happy engagement, meddling relatives, scheming frenemies.

The Appalachian Program at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Cumberland has produced original plays about prescription drug abuse, life in the coal mines and how young people decide to stay or leave Harlan County after graduation. The program compiles oral histories and interviews with Harlan County residents and turns them into plays about the present and future of Eastern Kentucky.