Theater
A 2012 Broadway Musical Scandalous began in the fall.
A production of the musical Saving Aimee, with a book and lyrics by Kathie Lee Gifford and music by David Pomeranz and David Friedman, debuted at the White Plains Performing Arts Center in October 2005 was staged at the Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA in April–May 2007. An updated, fully staged production opened September 30, 2011 at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre. A revised version of the musical, now called Scandalous: The Life and Trials of Aimee Semple McPherson began a broadway run at the Neil Simon Theatre on October 13th, 2012, with an offical opening date set for November 15 of that year. The musical stars Carolee Carmello as McPherson.
A play entitled The Wide Open Ocean, a musical vaudeville, was performed at The Actors' Gang theater in Los Angeles. It was written and directed by playwright, director, actor, and educator Laural Meade.
In 2003, a play entitled Spit Shine Glisten, loosely based on the life of McPherson, was performed at California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Written and directed by the experimental theatre artist Susan Simpson, the play used life-sized wooden puppets, human beings and fractured and warped video projection.
As Thousands Cheer, a musical revue with a book by Moss Hart and music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, contains satirical sketches and musical numbers loosely based on the news and the lives and affairs of the rich and famous, including Joan Crawford, Noël Coward, Josephine Baker, and Aimee Semple McPherson.
The musical, Vanishing Point, written by Rob Hartmann, Liv Cummins, & Scott Keys, intertwines the lives of evangelist McPherson, aviatrix Amelia Earhart, and mystery writer Agatha Christie. It is featured as part of the 2010–2011 season at the Carnegie Mellon School of Drama in Pittsburgh, PA.
In 2007 a one-woman play titled An Evangelist Drowns, written by Gregory J. Thompson, debuted at Rogers State University in Claremore, Oklahoma. In 2008 the show was produced at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center. The play is partly based on the life of McPherson, but it explores fictionalized portrayal of her recalling lost loves, regrets, and remorse in the final hours before her death in 1944.
Read more about this topic: Aimee Semple McPherson
Famous quotes containing the word theater:
“The primary function of a theater is not to please itself, or even to please its audience. It is to serve talent.”
—Robert Brustein (b. 1927)
“Will TV kill the theater? If the programs I have seen, save for “Kukla, Fran and Ollie,” the ball games and the fights, are any criterion, the theater need not wake up in a cold sweat.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.”
—Ilka Chase (1905–1978)