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Drama Club 2010 - 2011 Season Announced

The Sun City Grand Drama and Comedy Club will present another season of five mainstage productions on the Sonoran Plaza stage. The program will consist of three plays, the 12th Annual Variety Show, and (in cooperation with the Music Club) another spring Broadway musical. Season tickets are now available.  Purchase of the season package will assure the theater-goer of prime seats at a 20 percent discount from the cost of tickets obtained for the individual performances. The productions:

The season will get under way, October 21-24, with the Neil Simon comedy/farce, Rumors. Four couples arrive at the home of a New York City deputy mayor and his wife to celebrate their tenth wedding anniversary. A gunshot is heard. The guests soon learn that there are no servants, the food is unprepared, the hostess has vanished, and the host is missing his earlobe. Whatever the circumstances, the socially prominent guests must shield their friends from the police and the press. Directed by Sharon Collar.

December 2-5, the Club will present Agatha Christie's masterpiece, And Then there Were None. Ten strangers are invited by an unknown host to a weekend retreat on a remote island off the coast of Devon, England. As dinner is about to be served on the first evening, a hidden voice suddenly rings out that each of the guests is guilty of an unspeakable crime for which they have gone unpunished. Then, one by one, the guests are murdered by an unseen hand, in a manner reflected in an old nursery rhyme. Who is responsible? Will anyone survive? Joy Bingham Strimple will direct.

January 20-23, 2011, the Club will mount George S Kaufman and Moss Hart's Classic comedy, You Can't Take It With You. Members of a large, extended family and their significant others share a townhouse on the upper west side of New York City where each engages in an exotic hobby. One manufactures fireworks in the basement; another prints anarchist handbills. Grandpa Vanderhof, the family patriarch, doesn't believe in paying taxes. Meanwhile, his granddaughter has fallen in love with the son of a Wall Street tycoon. As they gather for a "get-acquainted" dinner, federal agents arrive to arrest the lot of them for subversive activity. This large cast of zany characters will be directed by Fred Bornhoeft.

The 12th Annual Variety Show, That's Entertainment! will be presented in a new format: five performances over a single long weekend, February 17–20. Rather than the "theme" of recent editions, this year's production will be a true "variety" of song, dance and comedy in the tradition of Flo Ziegfeld and Ed Sullivan, demonstrating that "Sun City Grand's Got Talent!"

The season will conclude, April 14-17, with Irving Berlin's great musical, Annie Get Your Gun. Annie Oakley is an incredible shot who was raised "Doin' What Comes Naturally." Frank Butler, the star sharpshooter in Colonel Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show, has a different image of "The Girl That I Marry," but he finds that "My Defenses Are Down." Annie defiantly challenges him that “Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better" until she realizes "You Can't Get a Man With a Gun." In the end they realize that "Falling in Love Is Wonderful." Alice Korsick, who directed Oklahoma! this past spring, will show us that "There's No Business Like Show Business."

Subscriptions for the full season are available by mail order only.Order forms are available in the July issue of the Grand Times, online at www.granddrama.com, in the Activities Office, and by the calendars in the Sonoran Plaza, Chaparral Center, and in the Cimarron Center. Former season ticket holders will receive priority seating. Otherwise, seats will be assigned in order of postmark received. Tickets will be mailed to subscribers beginning in late August. The cost for the season is $60.00 per person, saving $12.00 over the price of individual performance tickets. Season ticket packages will be available through mid-October. Individual performance tickets will go on sale two months before each production. The ticket cost for each of the plays will be $12.00; tickets for the Variety Show and the musical will be $18.00. Questions may be addressed to Judy Piemme, Box Office Manager, by e-mail: boxoffice@granddrama.com.

 

  

New Format for Musical Productions

The 12th Annual Drama Club Variety Show in February, 2011, will be produced over one long weekend rather than the two weekend format that has been traditional for more than a decade. Moreover, only five, rather than six, performances will be presented on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, and Saturday and Sunday afternoons. (Saturday at 1:00 p.m.)

The new pattern has resulted from a change in priorities on the part of CAM and the Activities Office, which is now giving first priority for the scheduling of events in the Sonoran Ballroom to the popular outside "celebrity concerts" brought in by National Performing Artists. Two such concerts have been scheduled during the second week of February, and one on the fourth weekend -- forcing the Drama Club into a the single week between them during the third weekend of the month.

Schedule conflict is only part of a problem being faced by the Drama Club. These "celebrity concerts," with their intrinsic musical variety/review format, are proving to have a serious impact on the Variety Show when scheduled in the same spring time frame. While attendance at all other Drama Club productions has been robust (three performances of Our Town and all six performances of Oklahoma! were sold out), attendance at the Variety Show this past year was sharply down. Residents tell Club members that they have only so many dollars to spend on entertainment, they tell us that there are too many similar competing events, and then add the kicker, "We can always watch the Variety Show on Channel 22."

The irony is that, two years ago, the Club worked to put the Variety Show on television because for many years it had been sold out. It is, after all – with its cast of sixty or seventy residents – an opportunity for friends, relatives, and neighbors to see their fellow residents on stage. We cannot be put in the position of producing the costly Variety Show for public television without revenue to the Club. With regret, the Board of the Club has determined that the Variety Show in February of 2011 will not be shown on Channel 22.
     
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