Broadway Across America has announced its 2012/2013 Hippodrome Broadway Series, a seven-production 2012-2013 season which will include the return of two Broadway shows which were highly successful with Washington audiences, Wicked and Billy Elliot, along with touring productions of several recent Broadway hits.
Wicked, Steven Schwartz’s musical biography of the Wicked Witch of the West, will run between October 3 and November 4 of this year, and Billy Elliot, the story – fueled by the music of Elton John – of a coal miner’s son who wanted to become a dancer will play between December 18 and 30. Both shows enjoyed highly successful recent runs at the Kennedy Center and Wicked was last seen at the Hippodrome in 2007.
The Hippodrome’s extended-engagement calendar will also feature the touring production of Beauty and the Beast, the Disney musical which tells the story of a young prince trapped in the body of a brute, and, as the only drama in the schedule, Lombardi, a biographical play about the iconic football legend. In Beauty and the Beast, which will run from January 22 to February 3 of next year, a Prince struggles to escape a spell cast on him by learning to love and be loved. In Lombardi, which begins on March 5 and ends on March 17, we learn how former Washington Redskins Coach Vince Lombardi won the first Super Bowl and became generally considered as the best pro coach of all time by taking large, powerful men and smashing them into other large, powerful men.
In addition to these four extended-engagement plays, the Hippodrome will feature three limited-engagement musicals: the Eric Schaeffer directed Million Dollar Quartet, running between November 27 and December 2 of this year, Flashdance – the Musical, which will open on February 7 and close on the 12th of next year and the Green Day-inspired Broadway hit American Idiot, which will play between May 7 and 12, 2013.
Flashdance is a musical version of the 1983 movie which made Jennifer Beals famous; it is a story of a welder who wants to become a dancer, and who dances at a bar with friends who have aspirations of their own. American Idiot is a Tony-nominated account of three young men who escape the safety of their suburban homes to chance life in the big city; Christopher Isherwood of the New York Times called it a “thrillingly raucous and gorgeously wrought Broadway musical adapted from the blockbuster pop-punk album by Green Day.” Million Dollar Quartet re-imagines a 1956 jam session involving Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis that took place at the Sun Record Studios in Memphis, Tennessee.
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