Charlie Brown, Julia Sugarbaker and Little Red Riding Hood will take the main stage at Arkansas Repertory Theatre as it returns to live productions.
Will Trice, the Rep's executive artistic director, announced the schedule to patrons and donors Thursday night.
The short winter-spring season starts Dec. 2-23 with “A Charlie Brown Christmas.”
Eric Schaeffer adapted the show for the stage from the classic 1965 animated TV special, with credits for Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, director Bill Melendez and executive producer Lee Mendelson.
Anna Kimmell, former director of education at the Rep, now director of education at Flat Rock Playhouse at her alma mater, Elon University, in Asheville, N.C., will direct.
The cast will consist of youngsters ages 12-18. Auditions are set for Sept. 7-8.
The production will be onstage Thursday and Friday evenings and throughout the weekend with multiple shows each weekend day and on the four days leading up to Christmas Eve. General admission tickets will be $30, $15 for youngsters under 18.
The spring season at the Rep, 601 Main St., Little Rock, will include:
- Jan. 18-Feb. 6: “Designing Women” by Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, co-creator of the hit TV series of the same name. It’ll receive its pandemic-delayed world-premiere in October at TheatreSquared in Fayetteville, moving to Little Rock in January. Bloodworth-Thomason’s script brings the characters, at roughly the same ages they were in the TV series, to the spring of 2020.
- March 1-20: “School Girls: Or, The African Mean Girls Play” by Jocelyn Bioh. The reigning “queen bee” at Ghana’s most exclusive boarding school has her sights set on the Miss Global Universe pageant until a new transfer student from America with undeniable talent and beauty captures the attention of the pageant recruiter. They’ll be casting six girls (not, Trice says, actual teenagers but young women who’ll be playing teenagers) and two adult women.
- April 19-May 22: “Into the Woods” — music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by James Lapine — focusing on fairy-tale characters (including a childless baker and his wife, Cinderella and her step-family, Jack and his beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf) for whom, come the second act, ever-after isn’t quite so happy. Trice says he anticipates Minneapolis-based director Addie Gorlin-Han being able to cast “as many locals as possible” in the dozen principal roles, though the Rep’s contract with Actors Equity will by necessity limit the options.
Season ticket information will be available online at TheRep.org and by calling (501) 378-0405.