Pasadena Playhouse will present Teenage Dick, a brilliantly hilarious take on Richard III by Mike Lew and directed by Tony Award nominee Moritz von Stuelpnagel, streaming online at pasadenaplayhouse.org.
The production, produced in association with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Huntington Theatre Company, was professionally filmed in HD with multiple cameras in front of a live audience during the in-person run in Boston. Teenage Dick will be made available as a digital stream exclusively from Thursday, February 3 to Sunday, February 27, 2022.
The Playhouse will also host two special live "Watch Parties" which include pre-show talks with creatives, followed immediately by the show with live chat with the artists from the pre-show event. The "Opening Night Watch Party" on February 3 at 7:30pm will include playwright
Mike Lew, director
Moritz von Stuelpnagel and lead,
Gregg Mozgala and will be hosted by
Sandra Tsing Loh. The "Cast Watch Party" on February 10 at 7:30pm will include the entire of the cast of the production.
"
Mike Lew's brilliantly hilarious high-school spin on Shakespeare's classic play is at once everything you'd imagine and nothing you'd expect," said
Danny Feldman, Producing Artistic Director. "We are proud to have joined Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Huntington Theatre Company to create this extraordinary and powerful production and are fortunate to have professionally recorded the show a few weeks ago during the in-person run in Boston. "
Tickets for Teenage Dick are $25 for streaming video on demand, and $55 each for both "Watch Parties" and are available at
pasadenaplayhouse.org. Once purchased, patrons will have access to view the production for 48 hours. Video of the show will only be made available for purchase throughout the entire run of Teenage Dick.
Teenage Dick is produced in association with Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company and Huntington Theatre Company and had its world premiere at the New York Public Theater in 2018. Shakespeare's classic tale of power lust reimagines the most famous disabled character of all time as a 16-year-old outsider in the deepest winter of his discontent: his junior year at Roseland High. Bullied for his cerebral palsy, Richard plots his revenge - as well as his glorious path to senior class presidency.
Mike Lew is the author of Tiger Style! (Huntington Theatre Company,
South Coast Repertory, Olney Theatre Center, La Jolla Playhouse,
Alliance Theatre; O'Neill workshop), tiny father, Bike America, and microcrisis.
"
Gregg Mozgala gifted me with an electric idea: reimagine Shakespeare's Richard III in high school and call it Teenage Dick," said playwright
Mike Lew. "We set out to re-examine disability politics from Shakespearean times to our time, through a dark comedy that mashes up Shakespeare-talk and Tik Tok. We wanted to ask ourselves: if Richard III was third in line for king, what if this Richard is third in line for senior class president? And if he - still, today - feels like he has no hope of succeeding unless he plays dirty, does that make his journey MORE tragic?"
For Broadway,
Moritz von Stuelpnagel directed Bernhardt/Hamlet (Roundabout Theatre Company), Present Laughter (three Tony Award nominations including Best Revival), and Hand to God (five Tony Award nominations including Best Play and Best Director).
Director
Moritz von Stuelpnagel said, "Mike's done a brilliant job of modeling the play after classic high school makeover movies like She's All That or Can't Buy Me Love. You know, a lot of the movies many of us grew up on! And in all those movies is the question of whether you'll lose yourself before you find yourself. What's unique is that the play centers around characters with disabilities without being laden with the pity we often see around such characters. They are fully rounded individuals who navigate a world of cyberbullying, sex, and social politics, in a larger context of toxic masculinity which fetishizes strength and power in and of themselves. In that way, the play is a satire of everything that makes us scratch our heads about modern politics and considers if our politicians are maybe stuck in high school."
Featuring
Gregg Mozgala as Richard, Teenage Dick was commissioned and developed by Mozgala's own theatre company, The Apothetae, which is dedicated to productions that illuminate the disabled experience.
Jesse Green on The New York Times writes that Teenage Dick is "Exhilarating. It suggests how much richer the theater will be when it is truly open to artists of all kinds. Not just because those artists deserve employment but also because the canon of classics deserves reimagining to match our world." Mozgala was nominated for a Drama League Nominee for Distinguished Performance Award, honored as a "Champion Of Change" by the New York City Mayor's Office For People With Disabilities in 2017, and named a Kennedy Citizen Artist. Mozgala also received a
Lucille Lortel Award (Best Featured Actor) for his work in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Cost Of Living by
Martyna Majok.
The cast of Teenage Dick includes
Shannon DeVido (Hulu's "Difficult People," Netflix's "Insatiable"),
Louis Reyes McWilliams (
The Public Theater's Coriolanus, The Flea/
Notch Theatre Company's Anna Karenina: a riff),
Gregg Mozgala (Cost of Living,
Lucille Lortel Award, Teenage Dick, Drama League Distinguished Performance Award Nominee), Portland Thomas (Classical Theatre of Harlem's Fit for a Queen, Bedlam with The
McCarter Theatre's Hamlet & St. Joan),
Emily Townley (The Totalitarians,
Helen Hayes Award) and
Zurin Villanueva (Broadway: The Lion King, Mean Girls, Shuffle Along, and The Book of Mormon.)
The production features work by choreographer
Jennifer Weber (Disney's "Zombies 2" &Juliet at the Shaftesbury Theater in London), assistant director and choreographer Ashleigh King (Legally Blonde at Keegan Theatre, Fairview at Woolly Mammoth Theatre), Robb Hunter (Invisible Man at The Huntington, HIR at Woolly Mammoth Theatre), scenic designer
Wilson Chin (Warner Bros. and NBC's "Blindspot," Next Fall on Broadway), lighting designer
Amith Chandrashaker (Bhangin' It at La Jolla Playhouse, The Underlying Chris at
Second Stage), costume designer Kelsey Hunt (Who's Afraid of
Virginia Woolf at Ford's Theater, The Nether at Woolly Mammoth Theatre), and sound designer
Palmer Hefferan (Grand Horizons at
Second Stage, Tiger Style! at The Huntington). Other production staff include
Judy Bowman, CSA (Casting Director), Sam Layco (Stage Manager),
Kevin Schlagle (Assistant Stage Manager) and K. Rudolph (Associate Lighting Designer).
Photo credit: Teresa Castracane
