What’s onstage this summer and beyond
While Kennedy Center gets set to pack ‘em in this summer, several revivals of other award-winning and audience-arousing musicals — such as Mamma Mia!, Ain’t Misbehavin’ and Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — are set for staging by Howard County theater groups.
Mamma Mia! will be moving and grooving at Toby’s Dinner Theater soon. The play, inspired by the songs of the Swedish group ABBA, opens on June 15 and runs through Sept. 9.
The popular musical weaves together some of ABBA’s most beloved numbers, such as “Dancing Queen,” “Voulez Vous” and the title number, into an amusing, if somewhat forced, storyline about fathers, daughters, wives and errant husbands on an idyllic Greek island.
Tickets range from $45.50 for children to $64, including all-you-can-eat dinner or brunch. Certain performances also offer a discounted price for patrons 65 plus. See tobysdinnertheatre.com or call (410) 730-8311.
Coincidentally, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, a second movie based on the play, is set for release this summer. And ABBA has recently announced that, after a 35-year pause, it will soon start recording songs again.
Silhouette Stages will have a two-night staged reading of My Other Mother, a new musical described as “about families, real and imagined.”
The Columbia theater group will bring the reading to the Church at Covenant Park in Ellicott City on Saturday, June 2 at 7 p.m., and Sunday, June 3 at 3 p.m. Admission is free. Steffi Rubin wrote the books and lyrics, and the music is by Miriam Kook.
www.silhouettestages.com, (410) 637-5289
Meanwhile, the Chesapeake Shakespeare Theater — which has moved to Baltimore but still puts on outdoor plays each summer at Patapsco Historic Park in Ellicott City — will recreate the Forest of Arden for the Bard’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The comedy runs from June 22 to July 29.
Tickets range from $33 to $45 ($29 to $38 for those 65+). Up to two children 18 and younger may attend free with each paying adult. Call the box office at (410) 244-8570 or visit www.chesapeakeshakespeare.com.
Fall musicals
The song-and-dance productions continue after summer, when Rep Stage, the professional regional theater in residence at Howard Community College, presents Sweeney Todd, a 1979 Tony Award winning musical, to open its fall season.
With music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and filled with dark humor and psychopathic behavior, will run through Sept. 23 at the Horowitz Visual and Performing Arts Center’s Studio Theatre. Call (443) 518-1000 or visit www.repstage.org.
Silhouette Stages will kick off its 2018-2019 season in October with The Addams Family, a musical comedy featuring the ghoulish but hilarious relatives first portrayed on TV and in the movies. Exact dates have not yet been announced for the play’s run, which will be at the Slayton House in Columbia’s Wilde Lake Village Center.
Outstanding musicals continue at Toby’s with the presentation of Ain’t Misbehavin’ from Sept. 14 to Nov. 4. The revue won a Tony in 1978, and features the life and songs of jazz pianist-singer-songwriter Thomas Fats Waller.
Waller composed, among other standards, the title song of the play, as well as “Honeysuckle Rose” and “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue?”. The show also contains many more of his hits from the 1920s and 1930s Harlem Renaissance.
Toby’s has two more musicals on tap from November to March of 2019. The Little Mermaid, based on the animated 1989 Disney film of the same name (which was based on the classic story by Hans Christian Andersen), is set to run from Nov. 9 to Jan. 13, 2019.
Gypsy, which won numerous Tonys not only for its original 1959 production with Ethel Merman but also for subsequent revivals, will take to the stage at Toby’s for a two-month run, Jan. 17 to March 17, 2019.