Ritchie's CTG Gets Chaperone, Earnest & Bening in Cherry Orchard

The Center Theater Group 2005-2006 season, the first under Artistic Director Michael Ritchie, has been announced. The Los Angeles-based company's season will be highlighted by the U.S. premiere of the pre-Broadway musical The Drowsy Chaperone, the pre-Broadway engagement of a new staging of Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and The Cherry Orchard with Annette Bening.

The Drowsy Chaperone, which will play from November 18 through December 24 at the Ahmanson Theatre, features a book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar, music by Greg Morrison and lyrics by Lisa Lambert. In The Drowsy Chaperone, the curtain rises on a man in a chair; a present-day musical theater fanatic eager to share his favorite Broadway musical with the audience, the fabled 1928 Gable and Stein musical The Drowsy Chaperone. As he places the rare cast recording on his hi-fi, The Drowsy Chaperone blooms to life on stage, telling the tale of a pampered Broadway starlet who wants to give up show business to marry. Her producer sets out to sabotage the nuptials or it's curtains for him. Enter the chaperone, the debonair groom, a dizzy chorine, the Latin lover and a couple of gangsters. Ruses are played, hi-jinks occur and the plot spins completely out of control. The show was a hit in Toronto and has been rumored for an American run for a few years.

Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which will feature Bening as Madame Ranyevskaya, centers on a family facing bankruptcy and refusing to sell their cherry orchard. While life is changing all around them, they struggle to hold on to the world they once knew. Directed by Sean Mathias, the show is scheduled to run from February 12 through March 19, 2006 at the Mark Taper Forum.

Set in the 1890s in England, The Importance of Being Earnest centers on two men who have taken to bending the truth in order to generate excitement in their lives. John Worthing invents a brother, Earnest, whom he uses as an excuse to leave his dull, country life behind to visit Gwendolyn daughter of Lady Bracknell in the city. The second man, Algernon Montcrieff, coincidently decides to take on the name Earnest when visiting Worthing's young ward in the country. Things start to go awry when they all end up in the country together. Diana Rigg was recently reported to star as Lady Bracknell in the Broadway mounting, so she would presumably play the role in Los Angeles as well. The show will run at the Ahmanson from January 22 through March 5, 2006.

The Center Theater Group will also present Sidney Kingsley's Dead End, Robert Wilson's The Black Rider and return engagements of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake and Dame Edna: Back With A Vengeance! as part of its 2005-2006 season at the Ahmanson. In addition to The Cherry Orchard, the Taper lineup will include a transfer of the Atlantic Theater Company production of David Mamet's Romance, Robert Schenkkan's Lewis and Clark Reach the Euphrates, Joshua Sobol's Witness, Alfred Uhry's Without Walls and Water & Power by Montoya and popular L.A. troupe Culture Clash.