Pasadena’s A Noise Within Announces 2019-2020 Season: They Played With Fire

– Courtesy photo / ANW

A Noise Within (ANW) announced its 2019-2020 season with the theme, They Played With Fire. ANW’s current season subscribers and donors were invited to hear the news first at an exclusive event held on April 30 on ANW’s Redmond Stage. Season passholders and new subscribers now have the opportunity to access priority seating. Single tickets will go on sale to the public on Tuesday, June 11.

“A Noise Within’s 2019-2020 season embraces the incandescent power of change,” said ANW Producing Artistic Directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott. “Our upcoming titles are peopled with formidable characters – torches in hand – willing to either burn down the house or build a mansion of possibility.”

ANW’s fiery new season begins this summer with the California premiere of Nick Dear’s adaptation of the chilling fable by Mary Shelley, “Frankenstein” (Aug. 11 – Sept. 8, 2019). “Frankenstein” will be directed by guest director Michael Michetti, who also directed the critically acclaimed adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s shocking and provoking novella, “A Picture of Dorian Gray,” for ANW’s 2018-2019 season. Following “Frankenstein,” ANW will produce Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean” (Sept. 22 – Nov. 16, 2019), chronologically the first in Wilson’s celebrated American Century Cycle. The production will be directed by guest director Gregg T. Daniel, who previously directed ANW’s Ovation Award-nominated production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” From one Pulitzer Prize winner to the next, “Gem of the Ocean” will run in rotating repertory with Sam Shepard’s powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning 1978 play, “Buried Child” (Oct. 13 – Nov. 23, 2019), directed by ANW Producing Artistic Director Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, who recently directed the LA Times Critic’s Choice, “Argonautika” (closes May 5). Concluding 2019, holiday favorite Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (Dec. 4 – 23, 2019) adapted for the stage by ANW Producing Artistic Director Geoff Elliott and directed by Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott, will return for its eighth year.

The new year will begin with a stirring production of William Shakespeare’s emotional romance, “The Winter’s Tale” (Feb. 9 – April 11, 2020), directed by Geoff Elliott, who recently won a Los Angeles Dramatic Critics Circle Award for “Best Direction” for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.” “The Winter’s Tale” will run in rotating repertory through the spring with Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland” (March 1 – April 18, 2020), directed by guest director Stephanie Shroyer, who had previously directed LA Times Critic’s Choice, “The Madwoman of Chaillot,” in ANW’s 2017-2018 season. Then in May, A Noise Within will close its most explosive season yet with Stephen Sondheim’s Tony Award-winning musical thriller “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (May 10 – June 7, 2020). Julia Rodriguez-Elliott will direct the twistedly macabre revival that will run on its own for four consecutive weeks.

ANW Producing Artistic Directors Geoff Elliott and Julia Rodriguez-Elliott concluded, “whether they are teetering on the precipice of redemption (“Gem of the Ocean,” “The Winter’s Tale”), or revenge (“Sweeney Todd”), or haunting revelation (“Frankenstein,” “Buried Child”), or even an outrageous romp down a rabbit hole (“Alice in Wonderland”), they are all staking their lives on a chance to transform the world around them.”

“We invite you to join us as we venture with these risk-takers, revolutionaries, and game changers,” said Elliott and Rodriguez-Elliott.

To become a season passholder, visit anoisewithin.org/membership or call the Box Office at (626) 356-3121. ANW’s Box Office is located at 3352 E. Foothill Blvd., just north of the Madre Street exit off Interstate 210, in Pasadena.

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