With season ticket sales for 2014-15 already topping last year’s record high of 5,400, Riverside Theatre has released single tickets for sale. And sales could be brisk for the best seats remaining for a promising series of shows.
The Main Stage blockbuster for the coming season could be any one of three shows. The likely favorite is “West Side Story,” with “Crazy for You” running a close second and “Memphis,” the dark horse, as the hottest property with a version on tour stopping in West Palm Beach the same week the show opens in Vero.
Allen Cornell, the theater’s executive producing director, has given “West Side Story” top billing as the 2014-15 season’s third show, banking on it pleasing the big donors at the theatre’s largest fundraiser, a gala sponsored by the Friends of Riverside. “It comes down to the gala,” he says. “We try to find a show that they can get excited about, that has broad appeal.”
The attendees are worth a private showing: the gala raises over $400,000, he says.
And that doesn’t include the patron producers. This year, they number 60 – more than ever before. “Between the two, there’s $1 million,” he says.
Every cent counts. This year’s budget, $7.2 million, is also a record-breaker. For the first time, as reported last week, the state has fully funded Riverside’s $150,000 grant request. But along with donations, ticket sales have to make up the difference.
So far, 5,400 people have signed on as season subscribers, up from 3,200 before Riverside started producing only big musicals on its main stage about six years ago.
Revues are often used to kick off the season in the fall, when much of Riverside’s audience is still up north. This year, it’s “The Bikinis,” a revue of 1960s and ‘70s music written by Ray Roderick and James Hindman. Roderick co-wrote last year’s “I Love a Piano.”
Directed by DJ Salisbury, “I Love a Piano” turned out to be hugely popular. “It was a sleeper,” says Cornell. “Everybody loved it.”
Salisbury had been assistant director on the original show. Cornell invited Roderick down to see it, and they ended up deciding to stage “The Bikinis.”
“I like it because I grew up in that era,” says Cornell. The show was developed in Chester, Conn., but it is the true story of residents of a Palm Beach County oceanfront trailer park who were offered a half-billion dollar buy-out by a developer, until the deal fell through. In the play, a fund-raiser is staged by the middle-age former members of a New Jersey girl band. The show has already toured the country, though it has not had a run on or off Broadway.
January’s “Crazy for You” is the 1992 Tony Award-winning musical comedy written by Ken Ludwig, and based on the music of George and Ira Gershwin from the duo’s 1930 musical “Girl Crazy.” The newer musical includes hits from other shows as well, a winning combination that earned it Best Musical.
“Crazy for You” is a big show with tons of scenery and it’s scenery that’s involved in the story-telling,” says Cornell. “But it’s such a fun show that it’s worth the effort.”
The show will be directed by Riverside veteran guest conductor, James Brennan, who starred in “Crazy for You” for years. “He’s incredible,” Cornell says.
Then comes “West Side Story,” an American masterpiece, Cornell says, “a deeply thoughtful musical drama” that should provide the audience with an interesting contrast to the “sparkling effervescence” of “Crazy for You.”
Cornell calls the 1950s story of cultural assimilation and discrimination “an American masterpiece, the perfect fusion of music, dance and song.” He says the greatest challenge is its choreography. “The trick is finding somebody who knows the original choreography, because that’s what you want to recreate.”
Jerome Robbins conceived of and directed “West Side Story,” which opened on Broadway in 1957. With music by Leonard Bernstein, the show marked Robbins’ first collaboration with Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the lyrics.
The themes of “West Side Story” recur in “Memphis,” the final big musical of Riverside’s season. This time, instead of Puerto Ricans fighting with New Yorkers, the conflicts are between blacks and whites in the 1950s, set to a sound track of black music that ultimately brings both races together.
The show opened on Broadway in the fall of 2009 and won four Tony awards including Best Musical. It went on tour in 2011. Riverside was fortunate to have gotten the rights to “Memphis” prior to Kravis Center booking the tour at the same time.
In October, “Memphis” will open in London’s West End.
The show, based loosely on a true story, is about a white deejay in the 1950s who becomes a huge hit by playing black music and eventually falls in love with a black singer.
The show is a co-production of Riverside and the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia, as have been the final shows of the past two seasons. Sharing production costs by mounting the show in Vero and sending it, sets and all, to another theater, enables Riverside to offer a much bigger show as the season finale.
“Philadelphia is the fourth largest market in the United States,” he says. “It really makes me proud when the shows that started here in Vero become this big deal up there.”
While those shows are staged in Riverside’s main 700-seat theater, another smaller 230-seat theater in the same complex hosts the Second Stage series.
This year, two shows are slated: “Side by Side by Sondheim,” a revue of the great composer and lyricist, who wrote the lyrics to “West Side Story.” And “Underneath the Lintel,” written by Glen Berger. The one-man play tells the history of a library book overdue by 113 years, and it will star Jim Van Valen, an associate professor of theater at Iowa’s Cornell College. Van Valen met his wife Brenda when he played in Riverside’s “She Loves Me” some years ago.
“It’s a very layered play, perfect for Second Stage,” says Cornell. “You have to engage yourself into the listening part and give yourself over to the story. It’ll be interesting to see how many different things people get out of it.”
Single ticket prices range from $40 and $50 for general admission seats for Second Stage plays.
For Main Stage productions, tickets can be had as cheaply as $45 for balcony seats, up to $83 for opening night seats in the orchestra. Student pricing is available. Go to www.riversidetheatre.com or call the Riverside box office at 772-231-6990.
