The summer heats up with some sizzling drama, comedy, musicals, and dance this June. While the musical hits keep coming to the Hobby Center, some local theater companies will end their 2023-2024 with a dramatic bang and perhaps a murder or two. From immersive dance about Georgia O’Keeffe, to intimate love betrays to our favorite rooftop fiddler to Catastrophic’s annual comic chaos, Houston stages bring the ultimate theatrical summer party.
Hairspray from Broadway at the Hobby Center (now through June 9)
The musical based on the 80s John Waters film that was later made into a movie musical is back on tour with an all-new production that reunites Broadway’s award-winning creative team led by Director Jack O’Brien and Choreographer Jerry Mitchell. The dance revolution will be televised as 60s high schooler Tracy Turnblad’s ambition to take her big hair and curves onto the Corny Collins Show opens her eyes to segregation and racial injustice. Filled with some big comedy, the show still packs powerful emotional punch.
Dial M for Murder at Alley Theatre (now through June 30)
The Alley starts summer chilling early with this thriller of a drama. If you’re familiar with every twist and turn of the classic Hitchcock film, you might be in for some gripping surprises, as the Alley advises this new Jeffrey Hatcher adaptation makes some changes to highlight the complex women characters while keeping us riveted. This version weaves a whole new tangled web when Tony plots to have his wife Margot killed after he discovers her affair. Even while subverting expectations for those that love the film, look for stylish set and lighting design that pay homage to Hitchcock’s brilliant noir vision.
The Barricade Boys West End Party! at the Hobby Center (June 6-7)
The latest show in the Hobby Center’s new Beyond Broadway Series bring a bit of London posh to town with these four triple-threat performers. Adding their stage credits together the Boys have acted in most of the big West End musicals, including of course Les Miserables, hence the Barricade moniker. With a promise to take Houston audiences on a journey through musical theater history and beyond, these greatest showmen will create a party musical mashup while also telling stories of their world tours and their times in some of the biggest productions on the West End.
Four Seasons from Houston Ballet (June 6-16)
HB ends their 23-24 season with a selection of one act ballets, including a world premiere. While artistic director Stanton Welch’s glorious The Four Seasons, which dramatizes the stages of a woman’s life, is on the bill, all four works dance with themes of time’s passage. Set to an original score by Zeng Xiaogang, Disha Zhang’s recent work, Elapse, explores ideas of aging. Though only 8 minutes, George Balanchine’s powerful Tschaikovsky Pas de Deux is not to be missed. Rounding out the program is a world premiere, The Lightning Round by acclaimed resident choreographer of Complexions Contemporary Ballet, Dwight Rhoden.
Red Landscape: Georgia O’Keeffe in Texas 1912-1918 from Open Dance Project (June 7-June 15)
No one does immersive dance experiences in Houston like ODP and company artistic director and choreographer, Annie Arnoult. Inspired by pioneering Modernist artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s real personal letters, journals, interviews, sketches, photographs, and paintings this multimedia experience chronicles O’Keeffe’s time living in Texas in her 20s. This full length dance tells the story of how O’Keeffe’s ideas about art and life evolved amid the red landscapes West Texas. With set, lighting and costume design magic from the OPD company, Rice Moody Center’s Lois Chiles Studio Theater will become that Canyon Texas landscape. Audience will be able to explore the space as they walk amid the dancers weaving a story of O’Keeffe’s inner life, relationships and creative power.
Betrayal at Rec Room (June 13-July 6)
There are more than three sides to story in Nobel Prize winning playwright Harold Pinter’s twisty love triangle. Emma is married to Robert, yet having an affair with Robert’s best friend, Jerry. But when truth and confession becomes another kind of relationship treachery who is the real betrayer? The answers aren’t so simple, as we witness Emma, Jerry, and Robert navigate their own brutal and unexpected feelings about each other and themselves. Adding to the complexity, Pinter unravels the tale backwards where the end is the beginning and the beginning of love and betrayal the end. The intimate immediacy of Rec Room’s stage should add another level of heat in the moment for this cast of veteran dramatic Houston actors including Rec Room regular Brandon Morgan, Jay Sullivan (Heroes of the Fourth Turning, Alley Theatre), and Molly Wetzel (Dance Nation).
Tamarie’s Texas Toast from Catastrophic Theatre (June 21-August 3)
Catastrophic fans favorite time of the year rolls around once more as company co-founder, Tamarie Cooper, unleashes her comic commentary on subjects far, wide. For over 20 years she’s taken on aging, elections, truth telling and holidays, but somehow she’s never tackled Texas. Well it’s about time as Tamarie and her merry, mayhem-inducing performers sing, dance and pratfall through Texas sacred longhorns from high school football to gas station beavers, flag parades, giant roaches, tons of guns and the glory of Whataburger. Of course, it wouldn’t be a show focused on Texas without including a musical love letter to the best city in the Lone Star State, H-Town. Best of all, we get to play our favorite annual theater guessing game: Which Catastrophic regular performer will have to wear the weirdest costume of the year and what will it. Toast, roach, beaver, a 610 traffic jam? We can’t wait to find out.
Fiddler on the Roof at A.D. Players (June 26-August 4)
The company ends their 23-24 season with this multi-Tony-winning classic musical sure to put a song in audiences’ hearts. Set in the quaint village of Anatevka, Fiddler on the Roof follows Tevye, a humble milkman, as he grapples with tradition, family, and societal change in the face of encroaching modernity and anti-Semitic persecution in early 20th-century Russia. Though set over a century ago, the story of family, tradition and prejudice continues to resonate with us while songs like “Matchmaker, Matchmaker,” “If I Were A Rich Man” and “Sunrise, Sunset,” remind us why we love musicals. Look for a huge cast of A.D. regulars, Houston favorites and prestigious visiting actors to bring this musical event to live.
