Harlequin Productions eases into more diverse season with one-woman shows

Harlequin Productions, closed since March 2020, will reopen Oct. 22 with a rotating repertory season, so audiences eager for theater can catch four different shows during the last three months of 2021.

“Real live theater is indeed back,” artistic director Aaron Lamb said Saturday at the company’s virtual season announcement, which began with the normally natty Lamb dressed in a T-shirt and crunching on a bag of chips, as though he’d forgotten what it was like to be on stage.

The season, designed a few months ago with physical distancing guidelines in mind, begins with a pair of one-woman shows about legendary singers: “Tenderly,” based on the life and music of Rosemary Clooney, and “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill,” set at one of Billie Holiday’s last concerts.

Things will get serious in November with “Until the Flood,” set after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. It looks at Brown’s death and its aftermath from all angles. “My God! How I hate liberals,” one character says. “At least with an out-and-out bigot, I know where I stand.”

The show, based on interviews with people living in or connected to Ferguson, is the first of the shows that will fulfill the promise Lamb made at the season announcement, a promise to see the world as it is and tell stories that reflect the lives of those who haven’t typically been shown on the stages of mainstream theater.

“We have to be a community for all of us,” he said. “We have to set a bigger table. It is our obligation to make sure that we are seeing reality.”

“Flood” also is the first play in the 11-show mega-season — which stretches through the end of 2022 — that will have a cast of more than one. Playwright-performer Dael Orlandersmith created it as a solo piece, but Harlequin will stage the play, structured as a series of monologues, with a cast of five or six, Lamb told The Olympian.

Even into the winter, productions will remain smaller in scale.

Lamb’s own adaptation of “A Christmas Carol,” originally scheduled for the ill-fated 2020 holiday season, will debut in November and is already scheduled to make a return engagement in 2022. Terry Edward Moore of Seattle, who played Sherlock Holmes in Harlequin’s 2019 production of the Victorian literary mashup “Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol,” is on board to star.

The 2021 version will have a reduced cast, Lamb said, and it will be followed up by the musical mystery “Murder for Two” (with a cast of, you guessed it, two) and Samuel Beckett’s “Endgame.”

Truly large-scale productions won’t return until summer 2022, when the company plans to produce the gender- and genre-bending “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which Rolling Stone once termed “the first rock musical that truly rocks.”

The company also announced that its box office is merging with the box office at The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, a partnership that will save both organizations money.

Harlequin Productions’ 2021-2022 season

The theater reopens Oct. 22 with a fall repertory season and a determination to tell stories that represent a broader range of people and experiences.

• When: Evening shows at 7:30 p.m. Thursdays through Saturdays and matinees at 2 p.m. Sundays
• Where: State Theater, 202 Fourth Ave. E., Olympia
• Tickets: For straight plays, $35, $32 for seniors and military, $20 for students and youth; for “A Christmas Carol,” $49, $45 for seniors and military, $25 for students and youth; for other musicals, $42, $38 for seniors and military, $25 for students and youth. Season tickets are available now, and single tickets go on sale Aug. 16.
• More information: 360-786-0151, https://harlequinproductions.org

The shows

• “Tenderly” (Oct. 22-Nov. 20): The one-woman musical about Rosemary Clooney features Katherine Strohmaier of Seattle, who starred in 2016’s “The Last Five Years.”
• “Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar and Grill” (Oct. 29-Nov. 27): The award-winning one-woman play tells the story of Billie Holiday (Alexandria J. Henderson) through her music.
• “Until the Flood” (Nov. 5-Dec. 4): The play, structured as a series of monologues, explores the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown.
• “A Christmas Carol” (Nov. 28-Jan. 2 and again November 2022-January 2023: Terry Edward Moore (“Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol”) stars in artistic director Aaron Lamb’s adaptation of the Dickens classic.
• “Murder for Two” (Jan. 21-Feb. 19): This 90-minute whodunit blends musical comedy with madcap mystery.
• “Endgame” (March 11-April 2): Samuel Beckett considered the play, in which a blind, paralyzed man and his servant await an unidentified “end,” to be his masterpiece. The play will be paired with Beckett’s short sketch “Rough for Theatre II.”
• “Sovereignty” (May 6-28): Set both in the distant past and the future, Mary Katherine Nagle’s play follows a young Cherokee lawyer’s fight to restore the jurisdiction of the Cherokee Nation.
• “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” (June 24-July 30, 2022): The multiple Tony-winning rock musical centers around a genderqueer East German singer who tells her life story during the course of one evening’s performance.
• “This Flat Earth” (Aug. 26-Sept. 17, 2022): The coming-of-age play, which the company presented as radio theater in fall 2020, follows two 12-year-olds trying to make sense of life after a shooting at their school.
• “Fun Home” (Oct. 7-Nov. 5, 2022): The Tony-winning tragicomic musical, based on Alison Bechdel’s autobiographical graphic novel, wowed local theatergoers when South Puget Sound Community College staged it in 2019.

This story was originally published June 17, 2021 at 5:00 AM.