Celebrity Attractions will open its 2014-15 Broadway Season with a big brass band and bells on the hill.
The Music Man in Concert, marking the 50th anniversary of Meredith Willson’s musical, will run Oct. 3-5 at the Maumelle Performing Arts Center, Maumelle High School, 100 Victory Lane, Maumelle.
Shirley Jones, who turns 80 on March 31 and played Marian the Librarian in the 1962 movie version of The Music Man, will play Marian’s mother, Mrs. Paroo. Her son, Patrick Cassidy, will play con man/traveling salesman/band leader Harold Hill, the role originated by Robert Preston.
The partially staged production will include a full cast and will be in full costume, with projections and film clips and an onstage orchestra. Celebrity Attractions CEO Ed L. Payton said Jones will also discuss her career and experiences in making the movie between songs.
Payton said the Music Man in Concert tour, which starts July 1 and will end with its Maumelle engagement in October, will be very limited.
And it’s the fruit of intense negotiations with the producer.
“I told him we would love to kick off our season with this show - start off our Maumelle season with a bang, something unique, a star-studded event. He worked with us, [booking] Little Rock first, and worked backward from there.
“I wanted to communicate to folks that we’re not going to cut back on quality, we’re not going to cut back on what we’ll be presenting. This is a great way to kick things off.”
The rest of the season:
Longtime stage and screen stars Barbara Eden and Hal Linden, both of whom turn 83 this year, will team up for A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, Jan. 16-18.
Feb. 13-15: Camelot, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s musical set at King Arthur’s court. Payton says Phoenix Productions, which also produced national tours of The Color Purple and Spamalot, is staging the classic revival with “a little bit of an edge to it in visually bringing the story to the stage.” He compares it visually to cable’s Game of Thrones and the feature film 300.
April 24-26, 2015: Million Dollar Quartet (book by Colin Escott and Floyd Mutrux; music arranged by Chuck Mead; additional arrangements by Levi Kreis), inspired by the Sun Records recording session that brought together Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins for the first and only time.
MAUMELLE MOVE
Celebrity Attractions will put on its touring shows for the next two seasons at the Maumelle facility while its usual home, Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall, is scheduled to undergo a two year renovation starting this summer.
The reduction in seating capacity, from 2,500 at Robinson to 1,200 in Maumelle, has led the Tulsa-based presenter to expand the show’s runs from three performances to four - two evening and two matinee - to bring ticket sales closer to what they would have likely been for three shows at Robinson.
And all four shows will come on weekends, says Payton, making it easier for out of-town patrons to attend performances.
With the exception of the occasional special afternoon performance, the matinees are a first in this market, Payton adds, though they’re a big draw in the other markets Celebrity Attractions serves - Tulsa; Oklahoma City; Lubbock, Abilene and Amarillo, Texas; and Springfield, Mo.
Payton says he and his staff had expected that the move out of Robinson would force them to cut down the size of the shows they could bring in.
“Initially, we thought we’d have to scale back some; we were kind of sweating anticipating that we were going to have two years of very small shows, what I refer to more as off-Broadway shows,” he says, “but we’re not going to have to do that.
“We asked the technical directors from several touring shows to review the technical specifications of the hall, and the Robinson stagehands and technical director met with the director out at Maumelle, Bob Birdsong, who is an experienced stagehand himself.”
What they found was that the center’s physical and technical capabilities, including the size of the stage and backstage area, “are very compatible with a mid-sized Broadway national tour.”
WEEKEND BOOKINGS
Payton says he hopes to keep the weekend schedule once Celebrity Attractions returns to Robinson, in the fall of 2016 if all the renovations go according to plan, “and hopefully grow enough to do a whole five-performance schedule - three evenings, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and two matinees.”
He’s also working on expanding the time frame. “We’ve been pretty much locked into early October through end of April, and we’re going to expand into September and May and June more than what we’ve done in the past,” he says.
Season subscriptions are $111-$259. More information is available by calling (501) 244-8800 or at the website, CelebrityAttractions.com.
Style, Pages 49 on 02/23/2014