SCR Puts it all Together

South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, California, has revealed a diverse fare of the old and the new--if not the borrowed or the blue-- for its upcoming 2009-10 season, featuring favorite works from the American repertory, as well as four world premieres. and two West Coast premieres.

The venerable Orange County company has been adding occasional musicals into the mix in recent years, and this year's treat for fans of the genre is a generous helping of Stephen Sondheim (pictured left) in the revue Putting it Together (September 11-October 11), showcasing 30 evergreen tunes from the master's musicals, wrapped into a simple story taking place at a sophisticated cocktail party.

Award-winning director Nick DeGruccio is at the helm. This is the fifth time SCR has staged a Sondheim work, the most recent being A Little Night Music.

Fans of musical fare will also be interested in Ordinary Days (January 3-24, 2010), featuring the music and  lyrics of Adam Gwon. Four New Yorkers try to find their way in the world and become increasingly connected through a series of funny and fortuitous events. This new show will premiere in New York this fall at the Roundabout Theatre Company. Gwon won the Fred Ebb Award for Excellence in Musical Theatre Songwriting from The Dramatist Magazine.

Making its West Coast bow October 23-November 22 is Noah Haidle's Saturn Returns, about a feisty octogenarian reminiscening about the women in his life. In its world premiere will be Howard Korder's In a Garden (March 7-28, 2010), in which a summer house will adorn the garden of the Culture Minister of Aqaat, if he will live so long.  Korder is noted for such plays as Search and Destroy and The Hollow Lands. Another world premiere is Julia Marie Myatt's The Happy Ones (September 27-October 18), directed by Martin Benson, set in California's Orange County in 1975, in which an ostensibly happy yet troubled man finds a kindred spirit in an unhappy Vietnamese refugee. Two additional world premiere offerings (March 25-April 25, 2010, and March 7-29, 2010) are to be announced.

Two  classics are being offered. The acclaimed scribe August Wilson is represented with one of his standout works, Fences (January 22-February 21, 2010), directed by Seret Scott. This Pultizer winner, set in the 1950s, is the sixth in Wilson's hisoric 10-play cycle, chroncicling the African-American experience in the 20th century.

Beth Henley's (pictured above) ever-popular comedy Crimes of the Heart (May 7-June 6, 2010), another Pulitzer winner, is about three high-strung sisters in Mississippi. Babe shot her husband because he looked funny, Meg just hit town from Hollywood and had a nervous breakdown, and old-maid-to-be Lenny just had her pet horse hit by lightning.

In addition, the company will offer its traditional holiday production of Dickens' A Christmas Carol, as well as its Theatre for Young Audiences series, its Pacific Playwrights Festival, and its NewScripts Monday evening series of readings. All in all, its an ambitious and highly enticing season.

--Les Spindle