Circuit Playhouse Season to Include GOOD PEOPLE, THE MOUNTAINTOP and More

Playhouse on the Square has chosen the shows that will run at The Circuit Playhouse for 2012-2013. The season for the venue at 51 S. Cooper will open with Good People, a play about a single-mother struggling to make ends meet in Boston's Southie neighborhood. Written by David Lindsay-Abaire, a Pulitzer Prize winner for Rabbit Hole, Good People revolves around the dynamic between the lead character and the former high school sweetheart who she thinks can turn her life around when they reconnect.

In October Zombies from the Beyond, a quirky musical comedy set during the Cold War about the space race, involves buxom alien zombies who come to Milwaukee to collect male specimens to take back to their female-laden planet. The show spoofs everything from the movie musicals of the 50s to the grade-B space invasion films of the era with a score that is reminiscent of 50s pop.

For the holidays, Crumpet the crotchety elf returns in The Santaland Diaries done cabaret-style in The Circuit Playhouse's Memphian Room. Crumpet recounts his experience working as a department-store elf. The more family-friendly Ken Ludwig's Twas the Night Before Christmas will run on the stage. 'Night Before Christmas' is the story of a mouse whose house gets skipped by Santa. The mouse and his two friends, an elf and a spunky little girl named Calliope, set out on wild adventures to keep it from happening again in this joyful tribute to the holiday season.

The season picks back up in January with Katori Hall's The Mountaintop, a re-imagining of the events that took place on the night before DR. Martin Luther King Jr's death at the Lorraine Motel. This production will be a collaboration between The Circuit Playhouse and the Hattiloo Theatre.

In the spring of 2013, The Circuit Playhouse will present the musical Debbie Does Dallas, which is loosely based on the adult film about a young woman who gets her chance to become a Texas Cowgirls cheerleader. When she does not have the money for the bus fare, she and her friends get creative in this show that is more send up than homage.

Donald Margulies' Time Stands Still will follow later that month. The play was nominated for two Tony Awards including Best Play in 2010 and is about an adventurous couple, a photojournalist and a foreign correspondent, that consider leading more conventional lives when they are injured on the job. The conflict arises when one of them is not so ready to give up.

The Circuit Playhouse season closes with The Lyons, subject to availability. It is a dysfunctional family drama with humor in the vein of August: Osage County in which a family gathers in the hospital room of its dying patriarch and unleashes years of secrets and resentments.

Two additional productions will be staged at TheatreWorks as part of the POTS@TheWorks Series. The Left Hand Singing, a drama that begins during the Civil Rights Era and spans three decades to follow three families united by tragedy, will run in January 2013. In July 2013, POTS@TheWorks will feature the comedy 5 Lesbians Eating a Quiche, set in 1956 about the chaos that ensues when a homeland threat interrupts an annual quiche-off.

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