For its 2024–25 season, Center Theatre Group will bring some big-name musicals to the Ahmanson Theatre, as well as—after a nearly year-and-a-half pause—step up its programming at the Mark Taper Forum.
Parade, Life of Pi, Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends (a revue that features Bernadette Peters and Lea Salonga) and a to-be-announced “highly acclaimed Broadway musical” headline the Ahmanson. Meanwhile, the Taper will host a Deaf West Theatre coproduction of Green Day’s American Idiot in both English and American Sign Language, the world premiere of Larissa FastHorse’s Fake It Until You Make It and a new Hamlet adaptation by director Robert O’Hara.
Season tickets will go on sale May 8. Tickets to individual shows will go on sale a couple of months before their opening date.
Though last season’s schedule put smaller-scale dramas at the Music Center’s Mark Taper Forum on hold due a budget shortfall, the plaza’s distinctive round building will return to a more regular pattern of productions this year. (Notably, Larissa FastHorse’s Fake It Until You Make It was less than two months away from its debut when the 2023–24 season was canceled.) However, due to “an impending construction project adjacent to [it],” Culver City’s Kirk Douglas Theatre will only host a pair of kid-friendly productions under the organization’s community-focused CTG:FWD banner, Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical and El Otro Oz, a return engagement of a bilingual take on The Wizard of Oz. (CTG:FWD will also host the acrobatic Duel Reality at the Ahmanson.)
Back to the major programming, the lineup is largely full of critically lauded productions and playwrights (Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre, in contrast, typically leans more on blockbuster revivals and a sometimes mixed bag of contemporary shows). Time Out New York’s theater critic Adam Feldman awarded Parade five stars during its Tony-winning Broadway revival last year and called the musical tragedy “heart-piercing.” Fake It Until You Make It comes from writer Larissa FastHorse, whose The Thanksgiving Play—the first ever Broadway production from a Native American woman—satirized the performatively good intentions of white theater makers. And the staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes by way of Robert O’Hara, the Tony-nominated director of Slave Play, a “brash, smart and gleefully confrontational” show.
You can check out the full schedule of the upcoming season below.
American Idiot
Oct 2–Nov 10, 2024
Mark Taper Forum
Fake It Until You Make It
Jan 29–Mar 9, 2025
Mark Taper Forum
Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends
Feb 8–Mar 9, 2025
Ahmanson Theatre
Life of Pi
May 7–June 1, 2025
Ahmanson Theatre
Hamlet
May 28–July 6, 2025
Mark Taper Forum
Parade
June 17–July 12, 2025
Ahmanson Theatre
Duel Reality
Sept 11–22, 2024
Ahmanson Theatre
Cat Kid Comic Club: The Musical
Nov 22, 2024–Jan 5, 2025
Kirk Douglas Theatre
El Otro Oz
Spring 2025
Kirk Douglas Theatre