Annapolis-based Compass Rose Theater will produce a 2013-2014 season which features a graduate of the 2007 New York Fringe Festival and productions of three well-known and much-honored plays, the company announced yesterday.
Along with the announcement came the news that the new season, and its upcoming production of Lee Blessing’s Eleemosynary will be produced from its new location, 49 Spa Road in Annapolis, Maryland. (We’ll have more on this soon.)
The Fringe Festival alum is Another Day on Willow Street, the story of two New York couples, one straight and one gay, who meet each other for the first time after many years as neighbors. Both couples go through life-changing events against a backdrop of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Another Day on Willow Street will run from February 14 to March 9, 2014.
Compass Rose will kick off its season with a production of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Tony Award winning musical, The Sound of Music, a semi-fictionalized account of the singing Von Trapp Family’s decision to escape Nazi-occupied Austria. The Sound of Music will play from October 4 to November 10 of this year.
From December 13, 2013 to January 26, 2014, Compass Rose will produce Look Homeward Angel, Ketti Frings’ Pulitzer-winning adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical novel. The story views an iron-willed woman running a small-town North Carolina boarding house and an alcoholic husband through the eyes of her young son. The Chicago Sun Times called it “A big, boisterous, decidedly old-fashioned three-act family drama with a wide-open heart and a sense of everpresent death, “Angel” also is a work that in many ways seems to presage Tracy Letts’ August: Osage County.
Compass Rose will close its season with a production of the Shakespeare classic Romeo and Juliet. This story of forbidden love in 16th-century Italy has been the inspiration for much great theater, including West Side Story and Shakespeare’s R&J, but Compass Rose will be producing the play in its original form, from March 28 to May 4 of next year.
Compass Rose operates an acting school as well as a theater, and in the past has included students and graduates of that school in its productions. However, it has not announced cast or directors for any of its 2013-2014 shows.
