A con man, sharp tongues, dizzying heights, the afterlife and peeing will make up an unusually adventuresome season of theater at Herndon’s NextStop, the company has announced.
Catch Me if You Can, the Terrence McNally-Marc Shaiman-Scott Whitman musical about ace con man Frank Abagnale, Jr, will open the NextStop season on September 8 of this year. Abagnale, who posed as a pilot, a doctor, and a lawyer while being chased by the FBI, was memorably portrayed by Leonardo Dicaprio in a movie by the same name. The musical received four Tony nominations; music and lyrics are by the team which created Hairspray, and Vulture.com’s Scott Brown calls the musical “a natty little boutonniere of ear-tickling pastiche and ersatz Rat Pack swagger.” Until October 9.
Next up for NextStop is MacArthur grant winner Sarah Ruhl’s take on Eurydice, the ancient myth of a woman who is cast into the underworld on her wedding day and the heroic efforts of her husband, Orpheus, to bring her back. Ruhl’s unique perspective is to tell the story from Eurydice’s point of view, and add a beloved father into the underworld. Ruhl’s “language is indeed pure poetry,” Debbie Minter Jackson enthused in this review when Round House did the play seven years ago. From October 27 to November 20, 2016.
NextStop starts the new year off with Shakespeare’s riotous comedy, Much Ado About Nothing. You know the one: Benedick likes Beatrice, Beatrice likes Benedick, and so they show their feelings by slinging the most stinging insults they can at each other. (Just like you did in the fifth grade, eh?) In the mean time (and it is a mean time), Benedick’s buddy Claudio falls in love with the lovely Hero, but on the eve of their wedding, being deceived by the play’s villain, he accuses her of horrible crimes against him and walks out. It falls on Benedick and Beatrice to straighten things out. From January 19 to February 20, 2017.
Hundreds of people climb Mount Everest, the tallest mountain in the world, every year. But what about K2, the world’s second-tallest at 28,251 feet? Only three hundred people have ever reached the summit, and none in winter; the ratio of summits to deaths is about four to one. So that is the context for the play K2: two men on a ledge, one with a broken leg, 27,000 feet above the ground, with two hours of sunlight to get down. “Live theater for the adventurous…the kind drawn to those fearless people who routinely risk their lives to go higher, longer and faster than anyone before,” says John Moore of the Denver Post. April 6-30 of next year.
Finally, if you’ve never been to a musical about pay toilets, now’s your chance. NextStop will be running Urinetown, the Musical from May 25 to June 25, 2017. The Greg Kottis-Mark Hollman confection is ostensibly about a drought-stricken dictatorship in which it is illegal to urinate anywhere but in a pay toilet, but is in fact a wicked sendup of prevailing musical conventions. John Simon of New York Magazine said that the “lyrics have a die-hard whimsicality” and Bruce Weber of the New York Times called it a “zesty and full-bodied original”.
