Neil Simon Festival founder Richard Bugg recently announced the Festival’s 2016 season. The 14th season will feature two of Neil Simon’s plays, “London Suite” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” as well as Ernest Thompson’s “On Golden Pond” and the musical “Hank Williams: Lost Highway” by Mark Harelik and Randal Myler.
“On Golden Pond” by Ernest Thompson
“On Golden Pond” is the love story of Ethel and Norman Thayer. Norman is a retired professor, nearing eighty, with heart palpitations and a failing memory but still as tart-tongued, observant, and eager for life as ever. Ethel is the perfect foil for Norman, delighting in all the small things that have enriched their long lives together and continue to do so. They are visited by their divorced, middle-aged daughter and her dentist fiance who then go off to Europe, leaving his teenage son behind for the summer. The boy quickly becomes the “grandchild” the elderly couple have longed for, and as Norman revels in taking his ward fishing and thrusting good books at him, he also learns some lessons about modern teenage awareness—and slang—in return. In the end, as the summer wanes, so does their brief idyll.
“On Golden Pond” opened to popular acclaim. This touching, funny, and warmly perceptive study of a spirited and lovable elderly couple facing their twilight years introduced a significant playwright Ernest Thompson to the national theatrical community. Neil Simon Festival founder Richard Bugg announced that they have already confirmed TV and movie star (and previous Neil Simon Festival actor) Clarence Gilyard in the role of Norman Thayer.
“Clarence is a great actor,” Bugg said, “and the casting twist will be entertaining for all.”
“Hank Williams: Lost Highway”
Hank Williams, Sr. is frequently mentioned alongside Louis Armstrong, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Elvis Presley, and Bob Dylan as one of the great innovators of American popular music. Mark Harelik and Randal Myler’s “Hank Williams: Lost Highway” is the spectacular musical biography of the legendary singer-songwriter, following his beginnings on the Louisiana Hayride to his triumphs at the Grand Ole Opry to his eventual self-destruction at the age of 29. Along the way, we are treated to indelible songs like “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Move It on Over,” and “Hey, Good Lookin’,” which are given fresh and profound resonance set in the context of Williams’ life.
Experience the exhilarating feeling of Williams on stage. Watch classic country with the edges raw and the energy hot. By the end of the musical, you’ve traveled on a profound emotional journey.
“Brighton Beach Memoirs”
“Brighton Beach Memoirs” preceded “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound” as part one of Neil Simon’s semi-autobiographical “Eugene Trilogy.” “Brighton Beach Memoirs” is a portrait of the writer as a teen in 1937 living with his family in a crowded, lower middle-class Brooklyn walk-up. Eugene Jerome, standing in for the author, is the narrator and central character. Dreaming of baseball and girls, Eugene must cope with the mundane existence of his family life in Brooklyn: his formidable mother, his overworked father, and his worldly older brother, Stanley. Throw into the mix his widowed Aunt Blanche, her two young but rapidly aging daughters, and his socialist grandfather, and you have a recipe for hilarity, served up Simon-style. This bittersweet memoir evocatively captures the life of a struggling Jewish household where, as his father states, “If you didn’t have a problem, you wouldn’t be living here.”
“London Suite”
In “London Suite,” Simon crosses the Atlantic for a collection of four hilarious shorts set in a deluxe London hotel, a sedate place until the characters check in.
In “Settling Accounts,” the suite is occupied by an inebriated Welsh writer holding his longtime business manager, who is caught absconding with the writer’s money, at gunpoint. The manager concocts increasingly far-fetched explanations of what he was doing at Heathrow with the cash.
An American widow and her daughter are in England to buy shoes in “Going Home.” At the daughter’s insistence, the mother spends her last evening in London with a rich Scotsman.
The hotel guests in “The Man on the Floor” are a married couple from New York who have lost their tickets to Wimbledon and are about to lose their suite to Kevin Costner, who absolutely must have it now.
The evening ends on a funny but bittersweet note with “Diana and Sidney,” another chapter in the lives of two characters from “California Suite.” Oscar-winning actress Diana and her bisexual husband, Sidney, are divorced and seeing each other for the first time in years. He needs money for his lover who is dying of cancer. The money is not a problem for Diana, but the realization that she still loves him is.
The Neil Simon Festival is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The season will run from July 11 to August 13, 2016. Tickets can be purchased at simonfest.org or by calling (435) 267-0194 or (866) 357-4666. The Neil Simon Festival is on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Inquiries, donations, or letters to the actors may be sent to the Neil Simon Festival, PO Box 83, Cedar City, UT 84721.
