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Lollapalooza shapes up
Dresden Dolls join in the fun, plus Broadway in Boston and more

Dresden Dolls headed to Lollapalooza?

Tickets to the first West Coast stop of this summer’s revived and revamped two-day Lollapalooza went on sale last weekend, and an official-looking announcement of the line-up posted on a couple of blogs — if it holds up — offers two surprise Boston guests: both Wheat and Rumble-winning cabaret punks the Dresden Dolls are on the bill. (In a separate announcement last Monday, the Pixies joined the tour, but only for the shows in NY and LA, which means there’s still no local date for the band’s reunion.) Lollapalooza will hit the Tweeter Center in Mansfield on August 14 and 15. Thus far, day one looks like a mid-’90s Lolla, with sets from Morrissey, Sonic Youth, Kathleen Hanna’s Le Tigre, Modest Mouse, Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, Broken Social Scene, Michigan noise fiends Wolf Eyes (?!), Grey Album remixer Danger Mouse, the Datsuns, and Swedish cherry bombs Sahara Hotnights. Day two, reflecting Perry Farrell’s new-found infatuation with the jam-band scene, will see the String Cheese Incident headlining over the Flaming Lips, Gomez, the Polyphonic Spree, the Thrills, politicized hip-hoppers the Coup, Sound Tribe Sector 9, Elbow, and the aforementioned Wheat and Dresden Dolls. Reached by phone last week, Dolls’ frontwoman Amanda Palmer said her band’s involvement with the tour was a "90 percent done deal" but that the final touches were still in progress.

In the meantime, the Dolls’ debut studio album, Dresden Dolls, has been repackaged and repressed for a national push. The new version, including a video for "Girl Anachronism," is still on the band’s own 8 Foot Doll label, but it’s getting nationwide distribution through the mega-indie label Koch, and the Dolls’ publishing is now being handled through the Universal-affiliated metal-centric indie Roadrunner, a label that Palmer says "will probably release our next record." Susan Blond Inc., the indie firm that handles Kiss, Ozzy Osbourne, Britney Spears, and Lorna Luft, has signed on, and since its Web site lists the Dolls under both "Rock" and "Theatrical" music, we figure Susan is familiar with the band’s appeal.

— Carly Carioli

Broadway in Boston 2004-2005

Broadway in Boston/Clear Channel Entertainment president Tony McLean lists diversity among the producing organization’s goals. It would be hard to get more diverse than the Little Mermaid and Elaine Stritch, both of whom are headed our way as part of the 2004-2005 downtown theater season. Actually, McLean, MC of the annual dog-and-pony show to announce the upcoming season, was referring to audience make-up, which such recent productions as Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam and the Boston Phoenix/Broadway in Boston Student Rush program are trying to paint less white and less old. But if you look at diversity another way, next season offers a little something for everyone — though if you’re an Andrew Lloyd Webber fan, you may feel more equal than others, since both Evita and The Phantom of the Opera are promised.

The dictator’s wife and the masked man are not the only recidivists. Mamma Mia!, the tongue-in-cheek romantic comedy into which 22 Abba songs have been shoehorned, returns to the Colonial Theatre June 22 through August 8. And of course, The Lion King inaugurates the newly refurbished Opera House — which looked splendid in a "This Old Palace" construction-process video aired at the announcement fandango — July 16.

Autumn in the empire that now includes the Opera House as well as the Colonial and Wilbur Theatres and the Charles Playhouse (where Blue Man Group continues to beat its drum and Shear Madness turns 25 in January!) brings the rare treat of Elaine Stritch at Liberty, the one-woman show in which the legendary no-nonsense performer chronicles her six decades in show business, sharing some of the musical numbers she first made famous, including Company’s "The Ladies Who Lunch." That’s at the Wilbur Theatre for one week only, October 19 through 24.

Evita marches her forces into the Colonial Theatre, the first stop on a new national tour, November 2 through 14. Meanwhile, around the corner from Argentina, the Abbey Theatre of Ireland’s 100th Anniversary Tour of John Millington Synge’s rowdy classic The Playboy of the Western World moves into the Wilbur November 2 through 28. Helmed by Abbey artistic director Ben Barnes, Synge’s 1907 saga of a lad who becomes a hero in County Mayo by alleging he’s fatally clobbered his Da will play only four American cities, and Boston is one.

As we all know, Broadway in Boston stepped in to save that holiday necessary The Nutcracker, which was evicted from its home at the Wang Theatre in to make way for the Rockettes and their Radio City Christmas Spectacular. The Boston Ballet production will play November 26 through December 30 at the Colonial before moving to the Opera House in 2005. If you like your holiday entertainment noisier and your dancing more Stomp-like, there’s Barrage: Vagabond Tales, which follows the wanderings of a troupe of roving minstrels; it comes to the Wilbur December 14 through 19.

February, not entirely the cruelest month, brings the Broadway megahit The Producers, complete with little old ladies dancing with their walkers and "Springtime for Hitler," back to the Colonial. Max Bialystock, Leo Bloom, and their surefire scheme for bilking Broadway roll into town February 2 through 19. They’re followed February 23 through March 6 by the recent Broadway-hit revival of Wonderful Town, the musical built by Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green on My Sister Eileen. The production is directed by Kathleen Marshall.

The Wilbur will host Tony Award winner Ben Gazzara March 1 through 6 in the one-man show Nobody Don’t Like Yogi, whose title captures the topsy-turvy quotability of its subject, New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra. The New York Post pronounced the show "a home run." For those too young to know Yogi Berra from Yogi Bear, Dora the Explorer Live! makes new territory of the Opera House, where Dora’s Pirate Adventure takes place March 2 through 6.

The season’s only pre-Broadway engagement, a revival of the 1966 musical Sweet Charity, with book by Neil Simon and score by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, comes to the Colonial Theatre March 15 through 27. To be directed by Walter Bobbie, who staged the successful 1996 revival of Chicago, the show will star Married . . . With Children veteran Christina Applegate as the dancehall hostess originated by Gwen Verdon and played by Shirley MacLaine in the film.

The Little Mermaid, along with Aladdin, Tarzan, Dumbo, Snow White, and a host of other Disney film personae get into the act March 30 through April 10 when On the Record, a new musical compilation of more than 50 songs from the cherished cartoon movies, comes to the Colonial Theatre. But if that’s too wholesome for you, note that The Phantom of the Opera slinks into town, crashing chandelier and all, March 30 through May 8; the haunter of the Paris Opera will have an apt venue in our own Opera House. Wreaking havoc in less Gothic surrounds is Audrey II, the carnivorous basso plant of the Howard Ashman/Alan Menken musical The Little Shop of Horrors, which winds up the season at the Colonial Theatre May 3 through 15. Set in a Skid Row flower shop, the 1982 Off Broadway hit finally made it to Broadway, where it’s billed as "everyone’s favorite boy-meets-girl, plant-eats-world phenomenon." Now the man-eating puppet plant, which was a guest performer at Broadway in Boston’s announcement party, brings its appetite our way.

— Carolyn Clay

Lyric Stage 2004-2005

The Lyric Stage Company of Boston also announced its upcoming season this week. Local Sondheim expert and Lyric artistic director Spiro Veloudos kicks things off September 10 with A Little Night Music, Stephen Sondheim & Hugh Wheeler’s Tony-winning 1973 musical built on the Ingmar Bergman film Smiles of the Summer Night. The production will feature a trio of fine Boston musical-theater divas: Leigh Barrett, Bobbie Steinbach, and Maryann Zschau.

Also on the Lyric docket is the area premiere of Lisa Loomis’s Living Out, which has had successful runs in New York and Los Angeles. To be directed by Lois Roach, the sympathetic but satirical work deals with the day-care system in the United States. The Lyric will also produce Becky Mode’s amusing one-person show Fully Committed, whose protagonist is an unemployed actor manning the phones in a trendy Manhattan eatery where everyone wants a reservation. Veloudos will direct that one too. A revival of The Glass Menagerie is also definite, though a director has not been named.

The season will close with the New England premiere of Ken (Lend Me a Tenor) Ludwig’s comedy Shakespeare in Hollywood. The busy Veloudos will direct the show, in which Max Reinhardt’s 1935 filming of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is invaded by the real Puck and Oberon of Shakespeare’s play.

Dates for these will be set when the final two productions of the season are announced. Under consideration are Edward Albee’s controversial Tony- and New York Drama Critics Circle Award–winning The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia, which is about a successful married architect with a yen for the beast of the title (and we don’t mean Sylvia); David Mamet’s exploration of sexism in academe, Oleanna; Michael Hollinger’s Red Herring, a noir comedy set in 1952 and involving three love stories, a murder mystery, and a nuclear-espionage plot; and Joe DiPietro & Jimmy Roberts’s The Thing About Men, an "outrageous new musical comedy" in which the I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change team takes on the Doris Dörrie film Men.

— Carolyn Clay


Issue Date: May 7 - 13, 2004
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