Theo Ubique Cabaret Theatre has announced plans for its upcoming season to include intimate productions of the British musical Blood Brothers and the Gen-X pop opera Rent.
Fred Anzevino will direct Blood Brothers (September 25–November 15), the long-running West End hit about twins separated at birth and raised in vastly different circumstances. Christina Hall will star as the boys' birth mother; the show will have choreography by Maggie Portman and music direction by Jeremy Ramey.
The same team of Anzevino, Portman and Ramey will also collaborate on My Way: A Musical Tribute to Frank Sinatra (November 27–January 10), a revue conceived by Todd Olson and David Grapes featuring 56 songs recorded by Ol' Blue Eyes.
In the spring, director Scott Weinstein (currently a Jeff Award nominee for Griffin's Titanic) will stage Rent (March 11–May 1), the late Jonathan Larson's pop-rock semi-adaptation of La Bohème, about a group of struggling artists squatting in New York's East Village in the age of AIDS. Ramey will again provide musical direction, with choreography by Daniel Spagnuolo.
A new revue of the music of Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse, who together wrote the songs for the 1971 film Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory as well as musicals including Stop the World—I Want to Get Off and The Roar of the Greasepaint—The Smell of the Crowd, is set for next summer. An Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse Songbook (June 10–July 31) doesn't have a creative team attached as of yet. All four shows will be staged at Theo Ubique's cozy Rogers Park home, the No Exit Cafe; the company's next show, A Marvin Hamlisch Songbook, opens there this weekend.