Something for everyone this theater season

A mixture of the experimental and the traditional awaits Las Vegas theater-goers this season.

The 2008-09 season, which opens this month and runs through August 2009, will be marked by such off-beat productions as "Dragula" and a musical "Reefer Madness," a series of popular comedies by the Las Vegas Little Theatre and well-known theater pieces such as "The Elephant Man" and "The Music Man."

For those who prefer the unusual, the Insurgo Theatre Movement is offering several temptations.

"Dragula," by local choreographer Marko Westwood, is about a blood-sucker who's thrown out of Transylvania -- not for sucking blood but for being a transvestite. Local actor Shawn Hackler has come up with "Morphotic," an explanation of Kafka through his time-honored story "Metamorphosis."

Remember Tracy Letts? She recently won a Pulitzer for her epic family drama "August: Osage County." Insurgo is unveiling the Vegas premiere of her earlier "Bug," whose paranoid thriller has at least two different meanings. And fringe favorite Steven Yockey's "Cartoon: The Play" will explore the seamier side of the violence in children's animated shows.

Insurgo's season will end with a Shakespeare play most never have seen -- "Pericles, Prince of Tyre." The script may be most famous for the never-ending fierce dispute over authorship.

Cockroach theater group is jumping into the controversial foray with a Mac Wellman script whose title this family paper can't print. A satirical publication might call it "7 (Lewinskys)." Another local group, Atlas, is offering the seldom-seen locally "American Buffalo" by David Mamet, along with a musical version of the drug cult classic "Reefer Madness." Off-Strip Productions will try to pull out the stops with the Jerry Herman gay musical "La Cage Aux Folles."

What could be more experimental for Sin City than a Samuel Beckett festival? Several playhouses are pitching in to help Test Market bring its sixth annual celebration of one of the world's most revered writers. In addition to the master's "Waiting for Godot," patrons also will get to see the likes of Harold Pinter's "The Dumb Waiter," Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit," and Tony ("Angels in America") Kushner's "Slavs."

Las Vegas Little Theatre's smaller stage, the Black Box, is adding to the unusual with Neil LaBute's "The Distance From Here" and Jeff ("Poona the F***dog") Goode's offbeat "7 Santas." (Seven Lewinskys and seven very adult St. Nicks should alone make for a season difficult to forget.)

Traditional, light-hearted fare isn't being neglected, though. LVLT's mainstage is offering a series of well-known comedies ("Moon Over Buffalo," "The Ritz," "House of Blue Leaves" and others). Signature Productions will be playing it safe by remounting "Beauty and the Beast" (seen locally just this past June at Super Summer Theatre), "Once on This Island" (which they did in the 2003-04 season) and "Thoroughly Modern Millie" (done by Las Vegas Academy in 2006).

The Nevada Conservatory (the performing arm of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas) is, as usual, mounting a mixture of periods, genres and degrees of danger. You can't get any more traditional than "The Music Man" -- that tuneful salute to all things American -- or Oscar Wilde's ode to the nonsense pun, "The Importance of Being Ernest." Somewhere in the middle lies a new take on "King Lear" by local professor Michael Lugering titled "The Lear Project" and a new version of "The Diary of Anne Frank" (by Wendy Kesselman).

Intense drama is represented by the Vegas premiere of Conor McPherson's "Shining City," about a widower trying to forget his wife, and intense comedy makes an appearance with Christopher Durang's loony tale of love and hate in "The Marriage of Bette and Boo." Of course, original works (full-lengths, one-acts, 10-minuters) will abound, thanks to the UNLV's playwriting program.

The College of Southern Nevada is opening with the very mainstream musical "Shenandoah," but will drastically switch gears with a showing of Eugene O'Neill's very somber World War I drama "The Sniper," as well as a one-man monologue starring local Brian Kral as O'Neill himself. And, as if determined to present a finale to remember, the college will end its season with Edward Albee's "The Goat" -- about a man who falls in love with the title character, who's not a human in animal skin, but an honest-to-god goat.

The Las Vegas Academy of International Studies, Performing and Visual Arts is taking a challenge with "The Wiz" -- a musical based on "The Wizard of Oz" that's known for being performed with an all-black cast. It's not likely the academy will have the student numbers to do that, so it'll be interesting to see how they handle these roles. They'll also be tackling, among other things, the popular "The Elephant Man," about a deformed 19th-century celebrity, and the perennial favorite, "You Can't Take It With You."

Rainbow Company is welcoming the new season with an original play by local Jeremiah Neal based on two best-selling Dan Gutman books about a kid who becomes president. It should be fun to see how close Neal comes to capturing the spirit of Gutman's globally appreciated humor. And Rainbow will continue its tradition of rarely doing the expected by giving us a musical version of "Cinderella" not written by Rodgers and Hammerstein. David Kisorl and Fitz Patton are responsible for the new take, which features a near-sighted, tennis shoe-clad heroine and a bookworm prince, who also has a thing for tennis shoes. Go figure.

There's plenty more on the calendar, and keep in mind that many theaters don't announce productions in advance.

Anthony Del Valle can be reached at DelValle@aol.com. You can write him c/o Las Vegas Review-Journal, P.O. Box 70, Las Vegas, NV 89125.