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Arena Stage Announces Its 2012–13 Season

“My Fair Lady,” “The Mountaintop,” and “Metamorphoses” are on the schedule for next season.

Mary Zimmerman, who directed Arena’s production of The Arabian Nights last season, returns with Metamorphoses February 8 through March 17. Photograph courtesy of Arena Stage.

Arena Stage announced its 2012–13 season this morning, and it looks like the Southwest institution has lined up a crowd-pleasing parade of productions leading into next year. Artistic director Molly Smith, whose critically acclaimed production of Oklahoma! set new Arena box office records, will direct My Fair Lady in the fall, reviving the production she debuted at the Shaw Festival in Canada last April (watch highlights from the production here).

The season opens September 28 with One Night With Janis Joplin, a revue of the troubled singer-songwriter’s life featuring more than a dozen performers singing Joplin classics (“Mercedes Benz,” “Pieces of My Heart). My Fair Lady runs November 2 through January 6 in the Kreeger, followed by Pullman Porter Blues, a world premiere production co-produced by Seattle Repertory Theatre about three generations of train porters working in 1937, which will run November 23 through January 6.

Good People, a drama by David Lindsay-Abaire set in Boston’s Southie neighborhood, opens February 1. The play ran on Broadway last year starring Frances McDormand, who won a Tony for her role as Margie (the show was also nominated for Best New Play). Mary Zimmerman, who directed The Arabian Nights at Arena last year and Candide at Shakespeare Theatre in 2010, returns with the Lookingglass Theatre Company’s production of Metamorphoses, an adaptation of the legions by Ovid, running February 8 through March 17.

March 15 through April 28, Arena hosts the world premiere of Mary T. and Lizzy K., a new play by writer-director Tazewell Thompson about the unlikely friendship between Mary Todd Lincoln and her seamstress, a former slave. March 29 through May 12, the company presents The Mountaintop, an imagining of the last night of Martin Luther King’s life written by resident playwright Katori Hall. The show premiered in London and ran on Broadway last year starring Samuel L. Jackson and Angela Bassett.

The last show of the season is Other Desert Cities, a drama by Jon Robin Baitz about a dysfunctional family in Palm Springs. When the show ran in New York last year, the New York Times’s Ben Brantley called it a “witty, deeply enjoyable family drama.”

For more information on Arena Stage’s new season, visit the company’s website.