Rema Webb, Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad in “The Book of Mormon” on Broadway.
The Book of Mormon, tickets to which go for as much as $636 on Broadway, will anchor the Kennedy Center’s 2012-2013 theater season. The musical by the creators of South Park, which won nine Tony Awards in 2011, is one of several surefire money-spinners on the schedule for the upcoming season announced today.
Besides The Book of Mormon, which starts touring later this year, the Kennedy Center also announced productions of Anything Goes, Jekyll & Hyde, Million Dollar Quartet and War Horse. Expect War Horse, which won five Tonys, to be a big seller when it opens in the Kennedy Center Opera House in November. (Remember, it was a wildly popular stage play featuring magnificent puppet work well before it was a blah-blah Spielbergian epic.) Jekyll & Hyde, meanwhile, is a pre-Broadway tuneup for a remount of Leslie Bricusse and Frank Wildhorn’s musical adaptation of the Stevenson novella starring former American Idol contestant Constantine Maroulis.
Even for the Kennedy Center, it’s a shockingly populist lineup sure to get theater critics and reporters buzzing about topics like South Park and Book of Mormon creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone; the differences between the National Theatre of Great Britain’s War Horse and Steven Spielberg’s recent adaptation; and the real-life sessions between Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley as depicted in Million Dollar Quartet. After all, it was just a few months ago that Kennedy Center President Michael Kaiser bemoaned what he saw as a glut of populist narratives in arts reporting. (For the record: He was wrong.)
The less glitzy side of the upcoming season, however, should be redolent of teakwood, smoked fish and gloom. The “Nordic Cool 2013” series, beginning next February, features five plays imported from Norway, Sweden, Iceland and Finland. (What? No Denmark?) Among the Scandinavian highlights is the U.S. premiere of the Royal Dramatic Theater of Stockholm’s adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.
The Book of Mormon doesn’t come until the very end of the schedule, opening for a six-week run in the Opera House on July 9, 2013. Still, whenever tickets go on sale, expect them to go quickly. The touring version of the show, which kicks off in Denver this August, is already sold out. Kennedy Center tickets won’t be as expensive as they are on Broadway, Kaiser told the Post, but they should rake in a good amount.
The Kennedy Center’s full theater lineup for 2012-2013 is below. We’ll look at the Washington National Opera and other upcoming seasons later in the week:
