Our 45th season
"A Let Us Entertain You"
All I Really Need to Know I Learned
in Kindergarten
by Earnest Zulia, Robert Fulghan,
and David Caldwell (musical)
August 16-25, 2024
Auditions June 17-18, 2024
BACP is pleased to offer its first musical since 2019! Based on Robert Fulghum's best-selling books, Kindergarten takes a funny, insightful, heartwarming look at what is profound in everyday life. This tightly woven adaptation has earned standing ovations from Singapore to Prague— from L.A. to D.C. It's an evening of theatrical storytelling in revue format, with monologues, dialogues, and multiple voice narration, enhanced through the use of live piano underscoring, which provides fluidity, charm, and emotional texture, and seven original songs. These stories celebrate our very existence, from the whimsy of childhood to the wisdom of old age.
Blithe Spirit
by Noel Coward
October 18-27, 2024
Auditions August 26-27, 2024
This classic from the playwright of Private Lives concerns fussy, cantankerous novelist Charles Condomine, who has remarried but finds himself haunted (literally) by the ghost of his late first wife, Elvira. Clever,insistent and well aware of Charles' shortcomings, Elvira is called up by a visiting “happy medium,” the eccentric and flighty Madame Arcati. As everyone's personalities clash, Charles’ current wife, Ruth, is accidentally killed. She “passes over” and joins Elvira, allowing the two “blithe spirits” to haunt the hapless Charles into perpetuity.
A Tuna Christmas
by Ed Howard, Joe Sears and Jaston Williams
December 6-15, 2024
Auditions October 21-22, 2024
In this hilarious sequel to Greater Tuna, it’s Christmas in the third-smallest town in Texas. Radio station OKKK news personalities Thurston Wheelis and Arles Struvie report on various Yuletide activities, including the hot competition in the annual lawn-display contest. In other news, voracious Joe Bob Lipsey’s production of A Christmas Carol is jeopardized by unpaid electric bills. Many colorful Tuna denizens join in the holiday fun.
On Golden Pond
by Ernest Thompson
April 4-13, 2025
Auditions February 10-11, 2025
This is the love story of Ethel and Norman Thayer, who are returning to their summer home on Golden Pond for the forty-eighth year. He is a retired professor, nearing eighty, with heart palpitations and a failing memory—but still as tart-tongued, observant, and eager for life as ever. Ethel, ten years younger, and the perfect foil for Norman, delights in all the small things that have enriched and continue to enrich their long life together. They are visited by their divorced, middle-aged daughter and her dentist fiancé, who then go off to Europe, leaving his teenage son behind for the summer. The boy quickly becomes the “grandchild” the elderly couple have longed for, and as Norman revels in taking his ward fishing and thrusting good books at him, he also learns some lessons about modern teenage awareness—and slang—in return. In the end, as the summer wanes, so does their brief idyll, and in the final, deeply moving moments of the play, Norman and Ethel are brought even closer together.
Ken Ludwig’s Moon Over Buffalo
June 6-15, 2025
Auditions April 14-15, 2025
In the madcap comedy tradition of Lend Me a Tenor, the hilarious Moon Over Buffalo centers on George and Charlotte Hay, fading stars of the 1950s. At the moment, they’re playing Private Lives and Cyrano De Bergerac in rep in Buffalo, New York with five actors. On the brink of a disastrous split-up caused by George’s dalliance with a young ingénue, they receive word that they might just have one last shot at stardom: Frank Capra is coming to town to see their matinee, and if he likes what he sees, he might cast them in his movie remake of The Scarlet Pimpernel. Unfortunately for George and Charlotte, everything that could go wrong does go wrong, abetted by a visit from their daughter’s clueless fiancé and hilarious uncertainty about which play they’re actually performing, caused by Charlotte’s deaf, old stage-manager mother who hates every bone in George’s body.
