Sonoma Arts Live (formerly Sonoma Theatre Alliance) kicks off the first season under its new name on Saturday, April 18, with Dan Goggin’s “Nunsense: The Mega-Musical Version,” with preview performances on Thursday and Friday, April 16 and 17.
The show, which runs through May 3, is the first of six productions in the company’s Sonoma Arts Local program.
Sonoma Arts Live executive director Jamie Love says she hopes audiences will agree with her that the production is “laugh-out-loud fun.”
“As ‘Nunsense’ is so popular and produced widely, we chose this version because it adds new characters, a new song, and incorporates a larger cast,” says Love. “(And that) provides more opportunities for local actors to get their moment in the spotlight.”
Cast members include Abby Chambers, Jerome Sadhu Jr., Sue Martin, Cat Smith, Susan Lee, Nora Summers, Julia Holsworth, Tessa Hope Morgan, Paul Shafer, Devin Muller and RoyAnne Florence.
The idea for the original “Nunsense” began as a line of greeting cards produced and written by Dan Goggin. He expanded the concept into a cabaret, which ran for 38 weeks in New York City, and eventually into a full-length musical. The original Off Broadway production opened in 1985, running for 3,672 performances and became the second-longest-running Off-Broadway show in history.
The “Mega-Musical Version” stars the original five nuns along with five new (male and female) characters, including the never-before-seen infamous convent cook, Sister Julia, Child of God. “Nunsense,” the winner of four Outer Critics Circle Awards, including Best Musical, was called “a hailstorm of fun and frolic” by the New York Times.
“The crazy plot remains the same,” says Director Wayne Goodman, “and we are having such a great time bringing these characters to life.”
Five of the 19 surviving Little Sisters of Hoboken, a one-time mission that ran a leper colony on an island south of France, discover that their cook, Sister Julia, Child of God, has accidentally killed the other 52 residents of the convent with her tainted vichyssoise, while the other nuns were off playing bingo with a group of Maryknolls.
Mother Superior has a vision in which she is told to start a greeting-card company to raise funds for the burials, but the enterprise falls a bit short of its goal. The comedy ensues as the nuns present a variety show to cover the cost of burial for the nuns not yet laid to rest.
Tickets for the show are available through the Sonoma Arts Box office at sonomaartslive.org or call 974-1931. Curtatin goes up at 7:30 p.m. on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, and 2 p.m. on Sundays.
Performances are in Andrews Hall, Sonoma Community Center, 276 E. Napa St., in Sonoma.
For more information, visit sonomaartslive.org.
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