2023-2024 Season

Harvey, a Pulitzer Prize-winning comedy by Mary Chase, is the story of a perfect gentleman, Elwood P. Dowd, and his best friend, Harvey — a pooka, who is a six-foot tall, invisible rabbit. When Elwood begins introducing Harvey around town, his embarrassed sister, Veta Louise, and her daughter, Myrtle Mae, determine to commit Elwood to a sanitarium. A mistake is made, however, and Veta is committed rather than Elwood! Eventually, the mistake is realized, and a frantic search begins for Elwood and the invisible pooka, which ends with Elwood appearing, voluntarily, at the sanitarium. In the end, however, Veta realizes that she loves her brother and his invisible his best friend just as they are, and doesn’t want either of them to change.

Welcome to the Renaissance and the outrageous, crowd-pleasing musical farce, Something Rotten.  Created by Grammy Award-winning songwriter Wayne Kirkpatrick, and successful screenwriters Karey Kirkpatrick and John O’Farrell, Something Rotten was lauded by audience members and critics alike, receiving several Best Musical nominations and hailed by Time Out New York as “the funniest musical comedy in at least 400 years”.

Harking back to the original concept of Frankenstein, this version amplifies the film’s suspenseful horror and adds greater depth of character and motivation as well as a new and different love story. All of the eagerly anticipated elements are here: the stone walled laboratory, the crazed scientist, angry villagers, a swooning heroine, a fearful storm and the hideous yet pathetic, deadly creature with its confused mind and powerful, undisciplined body. The final confrontation between the doctor and the creature produces a startling surprise.

Bright Star is the story of one woman at two different points in her life: the first, when she is a wild young thing growing up barefoot and carefree in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina; the second, when she is a well-to-do magazine editor in Asheville, 22 years later. Her story is inevitably woven with that of an idealistic young man named Billy, with whom she shares a mysterious connection. As a young teen in Zebulon, North Carolina, Alice Murphy is hopelessly in love with small town heartthrob Jimmy Ray, the mayor’s son. Although their love was pure, it falls victim to the interference of ambitious parents, and their infant son is whisked away before their happy ending could ever begin. More than two decades later, Alice is the successful editor of The Asheville Southern Journal, and meets a promising young writer named Billy. Eventually they realize that they share a hometown, and when Alice sees the handmade sweater she knitted for her baby 20 years before in his personal belongings, she realizes that he is the son she lost so long ago. Their happiness is compounded at the end of the story with a Shakespeare-esque double wedding. Bright Star opened to generally positive reviews and closed after 139 performances. The cast recording was nominated for the 2017 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album.

A Twisted Christmas Carol is a Texas spoof of Charles Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol. It’s Christmas Eve in a small west Texas town, and cantankerous barbecue joint owner Buford Johnson gets in an argument with his wife Darla, tells her he’s skipping Christmas, storms out of the restaurant, goes four-wheeling in his pickup, gets hit by a twister, rolls his truck, and goes into a coma. He comes back in his dream where he’s visited by ex-business partner, Hank Walker, who plays the ghost of Christmas past, present, and future. Hank takes Buford on a journey similar to Scrooge’s in A Christmas Carol, only Texas-style.