Arvada Center announces its 2020-2021 theatre season

‘Kinky Boots,’ ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘Miracle on 34th Street’ among upcoming season’s attractions

The Arvada Center for the Arts and Humanities today announced the lineup of plays and musicals that will make up its 2020-2021 theatre season. Encompassing a wide variety of plays, Producing Artistic Director of Musical Theatre Rod A. Lansberry and Artistic Director of Plays Lynne Collins say they have chosen titles that all shine a light on the common threads of humanity that theatre can expose.

“For me, it’s about building on what we have done and what we can continue to do,”  Lansberry says. “We have a very dedicated community of theatre-lovers and I think that these selections will shine a light on what we do best – tell amazing stories.”

Storytelling is one of the most prominent threads that runs through both musicals in the Main Stage Theatre and plays in the Black Box Theatre. The intimate nature of these venues lets the creative minds of the Arvada Center experiment and engage the audience in new ways. “After we moved the Black Box Repertory Season in 2020 to theatre-in-the-round, we were delighted by the new possibilities,” says Collins. “By keeping this configuration in 2021, we will be able to highlight the intimacy of the space and explore different ways of staging to bring the stories to life.”

The 2020-2021 theatre season begins in the Main Stage Theatre with Cyndi Lauper and Harvey Fierstein’s Tony Award winning musical, Kinky Boots. Having debuted on Broadway in 2013, this musical puts a glittery spin on an uplifting and emotional journey of unlikely friendship.

Anglophile theatre-lovers will recognize the first Black Box Theatre play of the season – The Woman in Black, an edge-of-your-seat play adapted by Stephen Mallatratt from the novel by Susan Hill. The second longest running play in London (following the towering favorite The Mousetrap by Agatha Christie), The Woman in Black is the story of a terrified lawyer who hires a young actor to tell his story and exorcise the fear that grips his soul. However, the pair find themselves launched into a spine-chilling world inhabited by a dark spectre.

The holiday season sees a nostalgic and classic story of true belief and holiday spirit come to life in Meredith Willson’s Miracle on 34th Street The Musical. With book and score both by Willson (who wrote The Music Man), this musical version of the story plays up the nostalgia of the original film while capitalizing on the musical talents of one of Broadway’s most well-known composers.

For the fifth year, the acclaimed Black Box Repertory Company will perform three plays in repertory beginning in 2021. The repertory season kicks off with the classic Georges Feydeau French farce, updated by David Ives, A Flea in Her Ear. This fast-paced comedy follows a bourgeois housewife who suspects her husband of having an affair, and concocts a scheme that pulls even the most innocent bystanders into bed.

In keeping with the Black Box Repertory Company’s previous successes of staging literary works (Sense and Sensibility, The Diary of Anne Frank, Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express) the company will present George Orwell’s classic satire Animal Farm as the second play in the repertory season. This timely fable about power and corruption will be presented in a new staging by local actor, director, and writer, Jessica Robblee. Ending the 2021 Black Box Repertory Season will be Mother of the Maid by Jane Anderson. Exploring the challenges and delights of raising an extraordinary child, the play focuses on the life of Joan of Arc told through the unique and poignant perspective of her mother.

The Arvada Center theatre ends its season with a musical theatre love letter to rock ‘n’ roll in Million Dollar Quartet. It’s the true story about a legendary jam session at Sun Studios between Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins.