Stefanie Powers to Headline L.A. Reprise! Staging of On Your Toes

Stefanie Powers and Dan Butler will lead the cast in the upcoming Reprise! staging of On Your Toes at the UCLA Freud Playhouse in Los Angeles. The show will preview on August 14, open on August 15 and continue through August 26, directed by Dan Mojica. Jason Alexander recently assumed the artistic directorship of the Reprise! series.

Also featured in the cast of On Your Toes will be Jeffry Denman, Beth Malone, Brett Ryback, Jonathan Sharp, Yvette Tucker and Diane Vincent. The ensemble features Shell Bauman, Seth Belliston, Quintan Craig, Jennie Ford, Casey Garritano, Jeff Griggs, Chelsea Hackett, Joey T. Marshall, Melissa Paris, Aaron Pomeroy, Mark C. Reis, Katie Rooney, Jean Michelle Sayeg, Leslie Stevens, John Todd, and Scott Weber. The show will feature musical direction by Gerald Sternbach and choreography by Lee Martino.

On Your Toes was originally produced on Broadway in 1936, with music by Richard Rodgers, book by Rodgers, Lorenz Hart and director George Abbott and lyrics by Hart. While teaching music at Knickerbocker University, Junior Donal Denman enlists the help of arts patron Peggy Porterfield Powers to pursuade Sergei Alexandrovich Dan Butler, the director of the Russain Ballet, to stage a friend's jazz ballet "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue." After getting involved with the company's prima ballerina, Vera Barnova Tucker, Junior is forced to take over the male lead in "Slaughter." Trouble ensues when Vera's lover and dance partner hires two thugs to kill Junior. The Rodgers and Hart score features such standards as "Glad to be Unhappy," "It's Got to be Love" and "On Your Toes" as well as the classic "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" ballet, originally choreographed by George Balanchine.

Best known for her work on television Hart to Hart, Powers has appeared onstage in Applause, The Vagina Monologues and The King and I. She plans to bring a new one-woman show, One from the Hart, to California's Orange County Performing Arts Center in November.

Best known for TV's Frasier, Butler received a Drama Desk nomination for his one-man show, The Only Thing Worse You Could Have Told Me.... Other theater credits include Old Money, Light Up the Sky, The Lisbon Traviata, The Widow Claire, Emerald City, Biloxi Blues, True West, The Hothouse, Walk the Dog, Willie, Domino and Early One Evening at the Rainbow Bar and Grille. Butler co-starred in the Reprise! production of On the Twentieth Century.

Originally presented as "in concert" i.e. scripts in hand, Reprise! productions are now completely staged and choreographed. The casts are drawn from the best Broadway performers working today and actors working here in Los Angeles who rarely have the opportunity to appear in musicals. The number of performances of each show has grown from seven to sixteen.