Looking for something to do indoors now that the holidays are over? 2014 is starting off on a high note, with an impressive lineup of plays and musicals taking place in Philly over the next couple of months.
The Walnut Street Theatre, also known as the oldest theater in America, premiered two new shows this week. The 2012 Pulitzer Prize-winning “dramedy,” Other Desert Cities, uncovers deep hidden secrets during a budding novelist’s visit home to Palm Springs over the holidays that throws her family reunion into tumult. Upstairs in the theater’s smaller venue, Studio on 3, the iconic 1948 narrative of Driving Miss Daisy is brought to life when the elderly Miss Daisy suffers an accident and hires an African American named Hoke to be her chauffeur – and become her friend.
The Academy of Music will be amplified from January 14-19 by the sounds of the hit musical We Will Rock You. An alliance of rebel Bohemians await the return of rock in this futuristic setting, controlled by conformity and the Killer Queen. This London-adapted show features the heavy-hitting music of Queen and Ben Elton. As for the next act, The Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess and Mamma Mia will play at the Academy of Music from February 18-23 and February 25-March 2, respectively. The winter season will close with a 4-week run of Broadway’s longest-running show, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera, debuting on March 19th.
Wrapping up on February 8th at the Wilma Theater is Lisa D’Amour’s Obie-Award winning comedy, Cherokee, about two couples who embark on a camping trip only to lose one of their members and find a mysterious half-Cherokee at their campground. In another highly acclaimed play that deals with sudden transformations, a deaf man named Billy moves along silently throughout his intellectual and opinionated family in The Philadelphia Theatre Company’s Tribes. That is, until he falls in love with Sylvia, a woman on the brink of deafness, and discovers what it means to be heard.
If you’re itching for a bit of culture come February, Opera Philadelphia is performing an opera in three images, Ainadamar. This extraordinary, Grammy-winning opera is about the controversial life and diant death of one of Spain’s greatest icons, Federico Garcia Lorca, who found himself standing in front of the firing squad at Ainadamar (“fountain of tears”) in the middle of the Spanish Civil War.
If pop culture is more your tune, don’t pass up on tickets to see 50 Shades: The Musical at the Merriam Theater on January 30th and 31th, or Cirque du Soleil’s Michael Jackson the Immortal World Tour when it moonwalks through the Wells Fargo Center on March 25th and 26th.
Know of other performances you’re excited to see in the next few months? Let us know in the comments!
