‘Best of Shadowbox Live 2017’
SHADOWBOX LIVE, 503 S. FRONT ST.
614-416-7625, www.shadowboxlive.org
The best original sketches and songs of the past season fill this two-hour highlights show.
7:30 tonight and Friday night, 7:30 and 10:30 p.m. Saturday and various Fridays and Saturdays through Aug. 26; 10:30 p.m. Fridays for one-hour Nightcap shows $20 to $40, or $15 to $20 for Friday Nightcap shows
Otterbein Summer Theatre is offering a streamlined version the big, golden-era musical “My Fair Lady.”
Director Lenny Leibowitz drastically pared the cast and scenery for the musical, which continues through June 24 in an intimate, 237-seat onstage configuration at Cowan Hall.
“Stripping away some of the naturalistic trappings normally associated with a large-scale musical, you can achieve a kind of momentum and fluidity,” said Leibowitz, an Otterbein theater professor recently appointed artistic director of the summer program.
“It’s an exhilarating and refreshing approach that unearths the essential story and emotional core of the material,” he said.
Widely hailed as a great musical and scheduled for a revival next season on Broadway, “My Fair Lady” was adapted by author-lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe. The show was based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion” and the 1938 film version, which Shaw co-wrote and subsequently shared a best-screenplay Academy Award.
“The spirit of transformation permeates every moment, along with the power of the imagination,” Leibowitz said.
Beloved for songs such as “I Could Have Danced All Night,” “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face” and “On the Street Where You Live,” the two-act romantic comedy revolves around about a phonetics professor who bets that he can train a poor Cockney flower girl to pass for a duchess.
“If Henry Higgins can prove that a lady is really nothing more than a flower girl with some of his training,”
Leibowitz said, “then he can not only show how good he is at what he does but also can thumb his nose at society and call the whole class system into delightful doubt.”
To open the 51st season of Otterbein Summer Theatre, Leibowitz cast 11 actors (including nine in multiple roles) in the two-act show, down from 47 actors in the original 1956-1962 Broadway production.
“The theatricality makes the production very exciting because the audience gets to use its imagination in an