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At Play: Pigs And Pants

Wichita Community Theatre

This is the final week to see Hairspray at the Crown Uptown. Throughout August the theatre will present Spring Awakening. Winner of eight 2007 Tony Awards, including those for best musical, direction, book and score. Spring Awakening is a rock musical adaptation of the controversial 1891 German play by the same name. Set in late-19th century Germany, it concerns teenagers who are discovering the inner and outer tumult of transitioning to adulthood. And in September the Crown presents Cats.

Opening this week and running through August 11 is Wichita Community Theatre’s production of Steve Martin’s adaptation of the 1910 Carl Sternheim farce The Underpants, directed by Mark Anderson. Theo Maske has an unusual problem: his wife’s underpants won’t stay on. One Sunday morning they fall to her ankles right in the middle of town, creating a public scandal. Mortified, Theo swears to keep her at home until she can find some less unruly undergarments. Amid this chaos he’s trying to rent a room in their flat. The prospective lodgers have some surprises of their own.

Also opening this week is Mosley Street Melodrama’s production of Tom Frye’s Jail House Rock & Roll or I Love to Sing Sing and Kechi Playhouse finishes its run of The Importance of Being Earnest.

And July 24-28 Music Theatre of Wichita presents Betty Blue Eyes from George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, creators of HONK!. Betty Blue Eyes is based on the British film A Private Function. Set in 1947 England, when Princess Elizabeth’s forthcoming royal wedding is to be cause for celebratory banquets, a meat-deprived village wages internal subterfuge to abscond with a prize pig named Betty.

Jedd Beaudoin is host/producer of the nationally syndicated program Strange Currency. He has also served as an arts reporter, a producer of A Musical Life and a founding member of the KMUW Movie Club. As a music journalist, his work has appeared in Pop Matters, Vox, No Depression and Keyboard Magazine.