Tickets are NOW available only online. The University Ticket Office will open for ticket sales on August 20. Hours are noon to 5:30 weekdays.
Ticket orders can be taken by phone at 864-3982 or at the University Theatre Ticket Office, weekdays from
noon - 5:30 p.m.
To order tickets online, click HERE and you will be taken to the KU Theatre performances calendar. Click the month, event, and date of the performance for which you want tickets and you will be taken to the ticket order page for that event.
Unless noted, all performances are at 7:30 p.m.
* 5:00 p.m.
** 2:30 p.m.
The Kansas Summer Theatre production of this hilarious musical was such a hit we?re bring it back to kick off the 2007-08 season! Since it premiered off-Broadway in 1991, Pageant-The Musical has been a laugh riot for all ages! The show IS a pageant complete with six contestants vying for the title of Miss Glamouresse. Each contestant, representing a different part of the country, is competing in several different categories: swimsuit, evening gown, spokes model, and, of course, talent. There?s a smarmy host for the contestants to fawn over, the horribly cheesy themed production numbers, and the ever-popular Miss Congeniality award. The talent competition has every type of horrible performance imaginable?from bad poetry to a ventriloquist who is incomprehensible as she tries to speak through clenched teeth. And the spokes model competition has each contestant hawking a fictional, yet ridiculous, beauty product. And did we mention the fact that the contestants are all played by men in drag? This wild and funny satire of beauty contests is a sure-fire crowd pleaser. You'll never watch Miss America the same way again.
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The KU Theatre for Young People opens its season with the popular story of Alice and her adventures through the looking glass. A memory play set in the early 1920's as an elderly Alice reflects on the telling of the original story, this adaptation is faithful to Carroll?s original tale, Alice in Wonderland, keeping the Victorian charm and merriment as the audience is transported magically through the looking glass to a land of comic fantasy where logic is nonsense. Alice soon discovers that the landscape is marked out like a giant chessboard with ordinary objects, people and events, jumbled together with talking animals, animated chess pieces and creatures from fairy tale and folklore. She meets talking flowers, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, sees Humpty Dumpty fall from his wall, meets again the Mad Hatter and the March Hare, and eventually a gentle White Knight rescues her from the cruel Red Knight, so she can become a Queen. This classic play will be staged for the fourth through sixth grade students in the Lawrence and Douglas County school as well as for the public.
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First produced in Derry, Ireland, in 1980, Translations is a play about language and a showcase for our students? dialect skills. A quiet ensemble drama set in rural Ireland in 1833, it explores the troubled lives of characters struggling to adjust to the shifting dynamics of the world around them, which is undergoing quiet, but radical changes as the hard fist of British regulation seeks to impose itself on local tradition. The difference in language, which seems a barrier that cannot be broken, eventually is overcome as loyalties move from English/Irish to personal relationships. Friel?s play is delicate with artful narrative and a lyrical voice steeped in the lusty idioms of rural Ireland.
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In celebration of the 50th anniversary of the opening of Murphy Hall, the University Theatre and the KU Department of Music & Dance are staging this award-winning musical. Set in fictional River City, Iowa, the story focuses on Professor Harold Hill, a con man whose scam is to convince parents he can teach their musically disinclined children to play musical instruments. Taking pre-paid orders for instruments and uniforms with the promise he will form a band, he skips town and moves on before he is exposed. Hill's brilliant plan is compromised when he becomes attracted to the local librarian, who recognizes him for the fraud he is, but falls in love him nevertheless when he draws her self-conscious, lisping brother from his shell. When Hill's scheme begins to unravel, he is faced with the choice of escaping yet again or staying and facing the consequences. The original Broadway production of The Music Man opened in December 1957, ran for 1,375 performances, and garnered eight Tony Awards.
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The premiere production of this new drama by KU senior Adam Burnett tells of flamboyant pill popping, alcoholic binging, drug friendly romance novelist Linda Wood, who could potentially be a genius. At least that's what her editor, Pam, and the characters from her novel pronounce. As Linda nears the completion of the final novel in her lucratively successful Jacques and Sofia series, she is faced with an onslaught of major life alterations?the death of a father she had written off years ago, the arrival of her estranged housewife sister, an adoring love-infatuated editor, and a pair of characters she has to kill off before she can make the next bold step. As a new presence begins to flesh itself out in Linda's mind and strange discoveries are made, Jacques and Sofia fight for their life, and Linda finds herself in a significant place with rash decisions to make.
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Focusing on the dark side of life in the West, Fool for Love is primarily a struggle, mostly of words, between two on-again/off-again lovers. It continues Shepard?s exploration of the mythic American West, particularly as it was portrayed in the pulp entertainment of the 1950s and 1960s, but with contemporary environments and relationships. In the drama, we watch a pair of figurative gunslingers, characters who are helpless in the grip of fate, fight to the finish with piercing words. Eddie and May?s joint past fuels much of the play as each of them carries their own interpretation of the memory of their relationship. Eddie wants this memory to continue as reality into the future. May wants to escape the past and move on with her life as an individual. These memories seem to make this choice impossible.
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Staged by the KU Theatre for Young People for younger children one through three, this is a work of humor and honesty by one of the American masters of participation theatre. Moses Goldberg will visit KU for six weeks to restage this inspired, wonderfully entertaining adaptation of the beloved fairy tale. The show opens with a group of strolling players preparing to perform a play. After the prologue, which introduces young audiences to the conventions of the stage, they enact the story of the bragging baker, his patient daughter, and her attempt to spin straw into gold for the greedy queen so she may marry the shy prince. Rumplestiltskin, the evil dwarf, provides the gold, but at a terrible price the first-born child of the royal pair. When the dwarf returns to demand his payment, he prepares to take the baby unless the young queen can guess the dwarf?s name. Aided by a witty mime with some help from the audience, the comic Rumpelstiltskin is thwarted and a lesson is learned by all.
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Printed in the First Folio in 1623, this is considered to be the last of Shakespeare's festive comedies. A tale of shipwreck and disguise, it explores questions of gender and identity that recur from Shakespeare's early comedies to his later romances. Identical twins Viola and Sebastian are shipwrecked near the foreign land of Illryia. Believing her brother drowned and desperate to survive, Viola decides to disguise herself as a boy, Cesario, and enters the service of Count Orsino. When ?Cesario? is sent to woo the Lady Olivia, humorous problems arise when Olivia falls for Cesario and Viola falls for Orsino. What follows is a merry-go-round of unrequited love, mistaken identities, high comedy, low tricks, and desperate passion.
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Two senior theatre students have been selected to direct a twin bill of one-act plays during the spring semester.
The Bald Soprano is an example of absurdist theatre, which emphasizes the absurdity of human existence by employing disjointed, repetitious, and meaningless dialogue, purposeless and confusing situations, and plots that lack realistic or logical development. First performed in 1950, Ionesco?s meaningless story tells of the Smiths, who invite the Martins over to visit. Chaos breaks out among the couples as they become more and more confused by who they themselves are and their relationships to each other.
Linguish explores a disease, which causes aphasia, the neurological disorder that takes away a person's ability to use language. Four relative strangers are among the first to be affected and are thrown together in quarantine. Although they all suffer from aphasia, their symptoms and their causes are different. As time passes and the disease continues to take hold of their minds, the characters learn to adapt to each other, finding ways to communicate with their new linguistic abilities, and learn to understand what?s really being said (or not said). In 2006, this drama was staged as part of NEUROfest, the first-ever theatre festival dedicated to neurological conditions.
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Written by KU Theatre alumnus Neil LaBute, The Shape of Things questions what art is, psychopathy and intimacy, explorations of love, and people's willingness to do things for love. Set in a university town in the Midwest (sound familiar?), it centers on the lives of four young students who become emotionally and romantically involved. Evelyn, a post-graduate art student, meets the nerdish Adam in a museum where she's about to deface a statue. She then proceeds to do an even more thorough makeover job on the hopelessly smitten Adam. The play deals with the fragility of friendship and the illusion of love, but LaBute is also concerned with the conflict between art and morality and the grandstanding exhibitionism of contemporary conceptualism. The Shape of Things challenges society's most deeply entrenched ideas about art, manipulation, and love. LaBute directed the premiere production of the drama in 2001 and the Midwest premiere of the 2003 film, starring KU alumnus Paul Rudd, was held in Lawrence. Staged as part of the University Theatre?s Alums Come Home 5, LaBute will be in attendance at the KU production.
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