Good word at the Wilbur: 'Spelling Bee' coming for extended run
The riotously funny, Tony Award-winning musical ``The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee," by Rebecca Feldman, William Finn, and Rachel Sheinkin, comes to the Wilbur Theatre for an extended run starting Sept. 26 .
The musical about six intense spelling-championship candidates got its start at the Barrington Stage Company and is now having a successful run on Broadway.
Jon B. Platt , who's presenting the Boston premiere, said in a statement, ``I have always wanted to present a Broadway musical at the Wilbur, the most intimate of all of the downtown Boston theatres . Given this intimacy and the show's local connections with . . . Finn [a Natick native] and Barrington Stage, `Spelling Bee' is that rare perfect fit."
Casting information will be released later. Tickets ($25-$75) will be available to Huntington Theatre subscribers and the Wang Center Club July 16 and to the public July 30; call 617-931-2787 or go to www.ticketmaster.com.
In other Barrington Stage news, the company's Musical Theatre Lab, mentored by Finn, is extending ``The Burnt Part Boys" until July 15 and has replaced its two other shows. ``Travels With My Discontent: A New Musical Revue" replaces ``Meet Mister Future," July 26-Aug. 6. ``Disorder: A Mother/Daughter Vaudeville" replaces ``Dogs That Wear Hats," Aug. 17-27. Performances are at the Berkshire Athenaeum in Pittsfield. 413-236-8888.
``At that time it was told to us that, you know, because he hung himself he committed the sin of despair," he says by phone from New York. ``And because of that he went to hell. I could not understand why God couldn't forgive him. As a result I checked out of the whole God thing."
Not entirely, though, and not forever. As he grew older, Guirgis says, ``I felt I needed to have some kind of understanding and belief in a higher power or God. I think the plays I've been writing have been ways to get back toward it."
Guirgis's ``The Last Days of Judas Iscariot ," a courtroom drama set in purgatory, gets its Boston premiere in a Company One production starting July 14 at the Boston Center for the Arts. In the play, witnesses from Freud to homeboys to Satan proclaim Judas' s guilt or innocence.
This is the latest of Guirgis's plays to explore biblical themes in a gritty, urban fashion. ``Jesus Hopped the `A' Train ," he says, is ``all about forgiveness and one's responsibility to a higher ideal. `Our Lady of 121st St.' was about seeing how people go about trying to put away their childish things."
In ``Judas," Guirgis says, he went right to his childhood issues. ``God should forgive everyone," he says. ``If he can't, he can't be God. I can't be down with that."
What actually triggered the play was something very secular, though: deadline pressure. Guirgis's troupe, LAByrinth Theater Company , started pressing him for his next play, and the title popped out of his mouth, he says.
``I Googled Judas and came up with something like five billion hits," he says. ``He's one of the most written-about characters in history. Then I tried to approach him from a personal point of view, about how to explore my questions of faith and forgiveness."
Guirgis did his research on Judas by buying every biblical movie ever made that includes him, ``except the Mel Gibson one."
The original LAByrinth production of ``Judas," directed by Philip Seymour Hoffman , opened at New York's Public Theater in March 2005. The Boston premiere comes just months after the National Geographic Society published the first English translation of the Gospel of Judas. Fanfare over the publication led to much discussion about the document's suggestion that Judas played a more positive role in Jesus' life than is presented in the Bible.
In ``Judas," as in his previous plays, Guirgis writes for a large, multiracial cast and uses the language of the streets: witty, colorful, and frequently profane.
``I think the way the Bible is written, it doesn't necessarily give a great amount of access to young people who didn't live 2,000 years ago," he says. ``In New York it was very successful. So many people came up to me and said they learned about these people in ways they didn't learn about them in school."
Company One, which presents plays written for a young, multicultural cast and audience, performed Guirgis's ``Den of Thieves" last year and his ``Jesus Hopped the `A' Train" in 2004, for which it won the Elliot Norton Award for outstanding local fringe production. Artistic director Shawn LaCount says Guirgis's play ``deals with the question of whether there is a God, and handles it in a way that a contemporary younger audience can understand."
``The Last Days of Judas Iscariot" runs at the BCA's Plaza Theatre July 14-Aug. 5. Tickets: $6-$30. 617-933-8600, www.bostontheatrescene.com.
