The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee
Music & Lyrics by William Finn, Book by Rachel Sheinkin
February 4-6, 11-13, 18-20
Midvale Performing Arts Center
Directed By: Kirt Bateman

This is a hilarious tale of overachievers' angst chronicling the experience of six adolescent outsiders vying for the spelling championship of a lifetime. The show's Tony Award winning team has created the unlikeliest of hit musicals about the unlikeliest of heroes: a quirky yet charming cast of outsiders for whom a spelling bee is the one place where they can stand out and fit in at the same time.

Before every performance four audience volunteers are recruited to participate onstage as guest spellers. Each new foursome guarantees a new set of hilarious and unexpected experiences – one night is just as unique as the one before it. The willing contestants are chosen through a careful vetting process, utilizing pre-show lobby interviews and audience questionnaires.

An Ideal Husband
By Oscar Wilde
July 15-17, 22-24, 29-31
Midvale Performing Arts Center
Directed By: Mark Fossen

Sir Robert Chiltern, a member of Parliament, has a skeleton in his closet and is blackmailed into a shady business deal by a lady of mystery (Mrs. Cheveley), who turns out to be a loathed school chum of the parliamentarian's wife, Gertrude. Everything is resolved happily, but not until after some devious twists of fate, several mistaken identities, lots of comic banter, and much social skewering. Wilde has a sharp eye for hypocrisy and the artificial poses demanded by society--but political commentary never gets in the way of a smart laugh.

Steel Magnolias
By Robert Harling
August 26-28, September 2-4, 9-11
Midvale Performing Arts Center
Directed By: TBA

Steel Magnolias is the story of a close-knit circle of friends whose lives come to-gether in Truvy’s beauty parlor, where the play takes place. The play opens with the ladies preparing for a wedding reception that afternoon. First, M'Lynn and Shelby (the bride) enter to get their hair done for the wedding. Annelle Depuy Desoto (who may or may not be married because her marriage may not be legal) is introduced to Truvy's customers as her new "glamour technician." While in the chairs, the sour-tempered Ouiser Boudreaux shows up and entertains the assemblage with her barbs. It seems that the only one of the group who truly understands Ouiser is Clairee who is recently widowed and looking for a diversion. As she says, "If you can't find anything good to say about anybody, come sit by me." Filled with humor and heartbreak, these "Steel Magnolias" make us laugh and cry as the realities of their lives in tiny Chiquapin Parish unfolds.

Dancing At Lughnasa
By Brian Friel
November 4-6, 11-13, 18-20
Midvale Performing Arts Center
Directed By: TBA

This extraordinary play is the story of five unmarried sisters eking out their lives in a small village in Ireland in l936. We meet them at the time of the festival of Lughnasa, which celebrates the pagan god of the harvest with drunken revelry and dancing. Their spare existence is interrupted by brief, colorful bursts of music from the radio, their only link to the romance and hope of the world at large. The action of the play is told through the memory of the illegitimate son of one of the sisters as he remembers the five women who raised him, his mother and four maiden aunts. He is only seven in 1936, the year his elderly uncle, a priest, returns after serving for twenty-five years as a missionary in a Ugandan leper colony. For the young boy, two other disturbances occur that summer. The sisters acquire their first radio, whose music transforms them from correct Catholic women to shrieking, stomping banshees in their own kitchen. And he meets his father for the first time, a charming Welsh drifter who strolls up the lane and sweeps his mother away in an elegant dance across the fields. From these small events spring the cracks that destroy the foundation of the family forever. Widely regarded as Brian Friel's masterpiece, this haunting play is Friel's tribute to the spirit and valor of the past.