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LCCN Staff Report
LONG BEACH — International City Theatre has announced its 2027 season, and apparently defying expectations can involve everything from battling the pharmaceutical establishment to surviving an excruciatingly slow dinner in Palm Springs.
The five-production season at Long Beach’s resident professional theater company will feature a musical biography, medical drama, comedy, science fiction and a Pulitzer Prize-winning American classic.
ICT says the common thread is characters refusing to accept the roles, rules and circumstances handed to them.
First up is Tenderly – The Rosemary Clooney Musical, opening Feb. 19.
Written by Janet Yates Vogt and Mark Friedman, the musical traces Clooney’s journey from small-town Kentucky to becoming one of America’s biggest recording stars, along with the decidedly less glamorous parts of her life: personal turmoil, addiction and the comeback that followed.
Cate Caplin directs, with Daniel Gary Busby serving as music director. Tenderly runs Feb. 19 through March 7, with previews Feb. 17 and 18.
Things get considerably darker in April with The Man Who Killed the Cure, a fact-based drama inspired by Dr. Max Gerson, a pioneer of natural healing.
Written and directed by Luke Yankee, the play follows Gerson and business partner Rudolph Heller, refugees from Nazi Germany who take very different approaches to medicine. Heller works with major pharmaceutical companies while Gerson pursues what he believes is a more natural and less expensive path to treating patients.
At the center is a rather uncomfortable question: What happens when curing people and making money aren’t necessarily pointing in the same direction?
The Man Who Killed the Cure runs April 30 through May 16, with previews April 28 and 29.
June brings considerably more laughter — unless you’ve ever been starving while waiting for a waiter who seems determined to discuss everything except your food.
Slow Food, written by Wendy MacLeod and directed by Brian Shnipper, follows a vacationing couple celebrating their anniversary at a Greek restaurant in Palm Springs.
Their evening is hijacked by an eccentric waiter who insinuates himself into both their dinner and their marriage.
The question quickly becomes less about when the entrées are coming and more about whether the marriage will still be intact when they arrive.
Slow Food runs June 11 through June 27, with previews June 9 and 10.
ICT heads to the Moon in August with the Southern California premiere of Amy Berryman’s Walden.
Set in a not-too-distant future increasingly battered by climate change, the play centers on a NASA botanist returning from a year-long Moon mission. She reunites with her estranged twin sister, a former NASA architect who has retreated to a remote cabin with her climate activist boyfriend.
Old conflicts return as the sisters confront a considerably larger family decision than who gets Thanksgiving: whether humanity should remain on Earth or pursue its future in space.
ICT Artistic Director caryn desai directs. Walden runs Aug. 27 through Sept. 12, with previews Aug. 25 and 26.
The season closes with Driving Miss Daisy, Alfred Uhry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning story about an unlikely friendship that develops over 25 years.
After elderly Atlanta widow Daisy Werthan wrecks her car, her son decides she has driven her last mile and hires Hoke, an unemployed Black man, as her chauffeur.
Daisy isn’t thrilled.
Hoke isn’t exactly having the time of his life either.
But over the next quarter-century, the sharp-tongued Jewish widow and her patient chauffeur develop a friendship that crosses the racial and social boundaries of the changing South.
Driving Miss Daisy runs Oct. 22 through Nov. 7, with previews Oct. 20 and 21.
Taken together, ICT’s five productions approach its “defy expectations” theme from wildly different directions: reinventing a career, challenging the medical establishment, reconsidering a marriage, deciding whether humanity should abandon Earth and discovering a friendship neither person expected.
International City Theatre has received more than 500 awards during its history, including the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle’s Margaret Harford Award for Sustained Excellence and its 2016 Polly Warfield Award for an Excellent Season.
Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30 p.m. and Sundays at 2 p.m.
For information, subscriptions and tickets, call 562-436-4610 or visit International City Theatre.
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