If you missed the Arena Stage box office record-setting production of "Oklahoma" earlier this season, lighten your hearts with this news: It's coming back to the Mead Center for American Theater for a nice long run, July 8–Oct. 9.
This staging, directed by Arena's artistic director Molly Smith, breathed fresh life into the iconic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Diversity in casting choices allowed the historically accurate situation in pre-statehood Oklahoma to be reflected. Many of the same cast members will reprise their roles in the return engagement.
Ticket sales to the general public start March 4; for the first 24 hours -- 12 a.m. to 11:59 p.m. -- there will be $50 tickets on sale at the box office, by phone (202-488-3300, 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.), and online.
"Oklahoma" was so successful back in the fall, with audiences and critics alike, that there was a good deal of Broadway buzz. That buzz seems to be humming again.
There's other Arena Stage-related news. One of the other hits there this season was
On March 8 and 9, the Clarice Smith Center will present "A Performance & Conversation with Anna Deavere Smith." In this Smith at the Smith show, the Baltimore-born actress/playwright will perform excerpts from "Let Me Down Easy." She'll also discuss the creation of the that work, which involved interviewing hundreds of people, including quite a few celebrities, and then bringing those subjects to life onstage.
A Q&A will be moderated Murray Nossel, the writer/actor of "Two Men Talking," a provocative piece that will be presented at the center March 3-5.
Nossel and Paul Browde were adversarial schoolboys in South Africa. Their experiences generated the unscripted "Two Men Talking," which covers such loaded topics as bullying, homophobia and racism -- from the vantage point of two men who grew up "white, Jewish, gay, and privileged under apartheid."
Now there's a perspective you don't encounter every day.
'OKLAHOMA' PHOTO (by Suzanne Blue Star Boy) COURTESY OF ARENA STAGE; PHOTO OF ANNA DEAVERE SMITH COURTESY OF CLARICE SMITH CENTER.