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Penn State Centre Stage announces upcoming season

UNIVERSITY PARK — Shaking up its format just a bit, Penn State Centre Stage’s 2018-19 season will feature four fully-realized productions and four smaller-scaled shows.

Serving as the professional arm of Penn State’s School of Theatre, Centre Stage is the school’s the training program for emerging theater professionals. Each Centre Stage production is created from conception to completion on Penn State’s University Park campus.

The four Centre Stage productions will be staged at the on-campus Playhouse Theater, with the four Off-Centre shows to presented in Penn State’s Downtown Theater Center in State College.

Curtain time is 7:30 p.m. for evening performances, and 2 p.m. for matinees.

CENTRE STAGE

PRODUCTIONS

“Legally Blonde: The Musical” (Oct. 2-11) — Based upon the popular film, this fun-filled musical follows Elle Woods as she tackles stereotypes and scandals in pursuing her dreams and her boyfriend to Harvard.

“Clybourne Park” (Nov. 6-15) — This 2012 Tony Award winner is a spinoff of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin In the Sun.” The “razor-sharp satire” takes a jab at race relations, gender roles and inclusion in a fictional Chicago neighborhood.

“Hands on a Hardbody” (Feb. 19-Mar. 1) — With nothing more than hope, humor and ambition, ten tough-luck Texans desperately try to be the last one to hold onto a big, new truck so as to win it in an uniquely structured, hilarious musical.

“To Kill A Mockingbird” (Apr. 2-12) — Harper Lee’s revered tale is told through the eyes of young Scout, the daughter of Atticus Finch, a principled attorney who has to defend an innocent black man in a capital crime in tension-filled Alabama in the 1930s.

OFF-CENTRE SHOWS

“Polaroid Stories” (Sept. 18-22) — Consisting of a series of vignettes, which contain profanity, this play uses Greek mythology to vividly reveal the violence, addiction, relationships and poor choices of today’s homeless youth.

“Caroline, or Change” (Nov. 27-Dec. 1) — This “rarely performed ground-breaking musical” focuses upon an African-American maid and divorced mother of four struggling to survive while working for a Jewish family in Louisiana in 1963.

“Violet” (Feb.12-16) — This play explores what true beauty and what flaws really consist of. A scarred teenage girl buys a bus ticket to head across the country to a TV evangelist, whom she naively believes can heal her scarred face, after years of being isolated and ridiculed.

“Men On Boats” (Apr. 16-20) — A cast of diverse performers, using carefully exaggerated theatrics, comically tell the rollicking true-life adventure of explorer John Wesley Powell as he charts the waters of the Colorado River in a historic 1869 expedition.

Sneak Peek Celebration (Aug. 29) — Penn State Centre Stage will hold a pre-season look at the 2018-19 attractions at The Playhouse’s Lobby and Terrace. Theatergoers can meet the directors, designers and students who will produce the season’s plays and musicals. Snippets from selected productions will also be presented. There will be free parking in Lot Green B.

For tickets and more information call 814-863-0255 or visit www.theatre.psu.edu.

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