Fall Head over Heels for this upbeat Arcadia
Pack up your go-go boots and head on down to Constellation Theatre in DC, where you can celebrate the advent of spring in all its amorous, chaotic glory with a modern musical adaptation of Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th-century pastoral-romantic classic, The Arcadia, running May 1st through June 1st in a revival directed by Allison Arkell Stockman.
This is Renaissance poetics with a whole new twist: cleverly set to the music of the Go-Gos, in an inspired mash-up originally conceived by Tony Award-winner Jeff Whitty and brought to the Broadway stage by Baltimore’s own multi-talented playwright/librettist/translator/dramaturg (and novelist), James Magruder–also known for converting Marivaux’s similarly gender-bending tale of romantic polygons, the neoclassical Triumph of Love, into musical fodder for the Great White Way.
In part inspired by the form and content of Sidney’s Arcadia, Head Over Heels updates and reimagines the fantastical fable to a more modern, but still magical, world–one fueled by, but also entirely reliant on, keeping The Beat. Lose that, lose all. Along the way, through disguises and mistaken identities and a plot more twisted than a soft pretzel, the show gleefully celebrates self-discovery and queer identity, love in many permutations, and the restorative powers of music. Somehow, it manages to interweave Renaissance romance and Greek comedy with gender-bending fantasy and 80s rock in a laugh-out-loud, happy-ever-after love story.
With Constellation opening their revival nearby, James Magruder joined me by phone to recall the sometimes-convoluted path by which the project went from brilliantly bananas concept to rocking reality, and some of the lasting legacy its groundbreaking helped establish.
Find more on the production, including dates and times as well as tickets, here: https://www.constellationtheatre.org/
