Uptown Players’ 18th season will branch away from its home base at the Kalita Humphreys Theater with a four-show season, plus two add-ons.
The current season is only at its midpoint; on July 13, its production of the musical Priscilla Queen of the Desert opens, followed starting August 24 by the play Perfect Arrangement. Then an already-announced bonus show — Angels in America: Perestroika, the second half of their 2016 hit Angels in America: Millennium Approaches — returns in October, with the cast and director returning.
The new season opens in December with A Very Judy Christmas, a world premiere play with music written and directed by B.J. Cleveland and starring award-winner Janelle Lutz, who played Judy Garland for UP in End of the Rainbow and her daughter, Liza Minnelli, in UP’s The Boy from Oz. It runs Dec. 1–16.
The season will move Downtown to Moody Performance Hall for its first production of 2019, a bonus show. Jeremy Dumont will direct a multi-cultural production of Spring Awakening, Jan. 31–Feb. 3. “Jeremy is perfectly suited to bring the multiculturalism we want to this show,” said Craig Lynch, co-founder of the company.
Uptown will return to the Kalita with Disaster!, the Seth Rudetsky/Jack Plotnick musical parody of disaster movies. March 22–April 7. The annual revue and fundraiser Broadway Our Way will take place for the first time at Moody May 10–12.
After that, the remainder of the season will be at the Kalita, with the musical The View UpStairs, a regional premiere of the Off-Broadway story of the arson at New Orleans’ UpStairs Lounge gay bar, until the Pulse nightclub shooting the single largest mass-killing of gays in American history. June 21–July 7. The the season will end with The Cake, a regional premiere about a lesbian couple who try to get a wedding cake from a baker who resists making it. Aug. 9–25.
Tickets are available at UptownPlayers.org.
— Arnold Wayne Jones
