2024
Ophelia’s Jump Productions’s 2024 season includes a collection of plays that are guaranteed to entertain with compelling stories and educate current and new generations of theatre lovers. The ambitious 2024 Season will showcase two world premieres and the Annual Midsummer Shakespeare with productions in two locations. Memberships and sponsorships are available online now.
THE MUSICAL OF MUSICALS (the Musical)
January 26 – February 18
Music by Eric Rockwell, Lyrics by Joanne Bogart
Book by Eric Rockwell & Joanne Bogart
Directed by Beatrice Casagrán, Music Directed by Bill Wolfe
In this hilarious satire of musical theatre, one story becomes five delightful
musicals, each written in the distinctive style of a different master of the form,
from Rodgers & Hammerstein to Stephen Sondheim.
“Funny, charming and refreshing! It hits its targets with sophisticated affection!”
– New York Magazine
THE REVOLUTIONISTS
March 7 – March 30
By Lauren Gunderson, Directed by Sheila Malone
Four beautiful, badass women lose their heads in this irreverent, girl-powered
comedy set during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. Playwright Olympe
de Gouges, assassin Charlotte Corday, former queen (and fan of ribbons) Marie
Antoinette, and Haitian rebel Marianne Angelle hang out, murder Marat, and try
to beat back the extremist insanity in 1793 Paris. This grand and dream-tweaked
comedy is about violence and legacy, art and activism, feminism and terrorism,
compatriots and chosen sisters, and how we actually go about changing the
world. It’s a true story. Or total fiction. Or a play about a play. Or a raucous
resurrection…that ends in a song and a scaffold.
“It’s simply a brilliant script…” – CityBeat Cincinnati
LA TEMPESTAD or SHAKESPEARE GOES CARIBBEAN
July 11-21
By William Shakespeare, Directed and Adapted by Beatrice Casagrán
part of the Midsummer Shakespeare Festival in Claremont
performed at the Sontag Greek Theater, Pomona College
A story of shipwreck and magic, The Tempest begins on a ship caught in a
violent storm with Alonso, the king of Naples, on board. On a nearby island, the
exiled Duke of Milan, Prospero, tells his daughter, Miranda, that he has caused
the storm with his magical powers. Prospero had been banished twelve years
earlier when Prospero’s brother, Antonio—also on the doomed ship—conspired
with Alonso to become the duke instead. Prospero and Miranda are served by a
spirit named Ariel and by Caliban, son of the island’s previous inhabitant, the
witch Sycorax. This bilingual adaptation is set on La Isla de la Juventud off the coast of Cuba in 1895.
The production is grounded in Cuban culture’s vibrant mixture of Spanish
and African music and religion, featuring live
music with original arrangements of Cuban and Afro-Caribbean music.
KNIGHT OF THE BURNING PESTLE
July 11-21
By Francis Beaumont, Directed by Caitlin Lopez
part of the Midsummer Shakespeare Festival
performed at the Sontag Greek Theater, Pomona College
A joyful celebration of the universal capacity to improvise, this delightful
Elizabethan comedy is a rough and rowdy romp filled with MUSIC and
MERRIMENT! As a group of players gathers to present a play about the
elopement of star-crossed lovers, they are abruptly interrupted by a grocer and
his wife. They have a different kind of play in mind–an outrageous hero’s quest
of derring-do…The Knight of the Burning Pestle. And they know just the fellow
to star–their apprentice, Rafe. This new subplot–invented on the fly–takes over
the stage in surprising and disruptive ways.
TWELVE OPHELIAS (a play with broken songs)
September 6-29
By Caridad Svich, Directed by Elina de Santos
Shakespeare’s Ophelia rises up out of the water dreaming of Pop-Tarts and
other sweet things. She finds herself in a neo-Elizabethan Appalachian setting
where Gertrude runs a brothel, Hamlet is called a Rude Boy, and nothing is what
it seems. In this mirrored world of word-scraps and cold sex, Ophelia cuts a
new path for herself.
“A whimsical riff on Hamlet which imagines an afterlife for Elsinore’s unluckiest
lass. A twisted take on the tragedy.” -Charles Isherwood, The New York Times
SECOND DEATH OF A MAD WIFE (WORLD PREMIERE)
October 18-November 10
By Kelly Mcburnette-Andronicos, Directed by Beatrice Casagrán
Whatever happened to Jack the Ripper’s wife? Bunny Maybrick began life in an
opulent Alabama mansion and is ending it in a squalid shack full of cats in rural
Connecticut. She’s already given away most of her meager belongings, but the
heavy contents of her soul are harder to leave behind. That is, until a local prep
school boy, Theo Voss, becomes an accomplice in Bunny’s meandering, mad,
death-bed confession that includes adultery, arsenic addiction, and murder.
“Kelly McBurnette-Andronicos has written a wonderfully creepy and surreal
‘Northeastern Southern Gothic Noir,’ her wildly theatrical sense of the absurd
firing on all cylinders here.” -Doug DeVita
CJ, AN ASPANGLISH PLAY (WORLD PREMIERE)
November 29-December 22
By Mercedes Floresislas, Director to be determined
The play re-imagines A Christmas Carol as a Mexican-American coming of age story. Carolina Juarez (CJ) is the disaffected teenage daughter of a woman who struggles with depression and drug addiction. CJ is temporarily sent to stay with her aunt and Deaf grandmother who suffers from dementia. CJ, who speaks little Spanish and no ASL, cannot communicate with her Grandmother and wants little to do with her family. During a teenage tantrum, she destroys a stuffed monkey beloved by her grandmother, bringing the toy to life and ushering in a series of Aztec deities who teach CJ about her Mexican heritage and her grandmother’s life, giving her a new understanding of the many struggles that her grandmother endured as a young Deaf Latina trying to raise her baby. CJ finds an understanding and appreciation for her grandmother and for own culture and learns that communication comes in many forms.