BRING A GROUP & SAVE! Find out more... New theatre season blends premieres, old favorites Civic's 2006-07 Season is just around the corner, with an enticing blend of old favorites and Lehigh Valley premiere productions. Come along for the ride! Subscriptions and single-show tickets are on sale now! The season opens with A Man of No Importance, Oct. 6-22, 2006. Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty — the team behind last season's Seussical, as well as Ragtime — have created a stunningly beautiful chamber musical about the power the theatre has to transform our lives and the capacity each of us has to love one another. The play is about the journey of self-discovery and acceptance of Alfie Byrne, a Dublin bus conductor who is prone to reciting poetry to the patrons on his bus. He is also the director of the local community theatre, which operates out of a small parish hall in the neighborhood church. Alfie's passengers are also his performers: amateur thespians that come to see the magic the theatre offers through Alfie's eyes. The characters inhabit the world of working-class Dublin in the 1960s, a world where the budding sexual freedom happening in other places is barely whispered about. The beautiful book by Terrence McNally (Ragtime, Master Class) illuminates the feeling we have all felt of being an outsider, and our universal need to love and be loved in return, connecting to something larger than ourselves. Next comes A Christmas Carol, Dec. 1-17, 2006, with its usual warmth, spectacle, and tradition. Surprises are in store as always, with Civic's annual holiday greeting card to the Lehigh Valley. We return next to Terrence McNally, with another Tony Award winner, Love! Valour! Compassion!, March 30 - April 21, 2007, in the Theatre514 black box. At a beautiful Dutchess County farmhouse, eight men hash out their passions, resentments and fears over the course of three summer weekends. By turns hilarious and tragic, celebratory and cruel, this thoroughly engaging play will leave you hopeful and heartbroken all at once. "In this beautifully written work, McNally presents humbling evidence of what human love is and can be," offers The New Yorker. The New York Times calls it "a big, generous, haunted comedy that ... is both very funny and filled with intimations of time's passage, of loss and death." To round out the season, we present Robert Harling's Steel Magnolias, June 15-30, 2007. Concerned with a group of gossipy southern ladies in a small-town beauty parlor, the play is alternately hilarious and touching — and, in the end, deeply revealing of the strength and purposefulness that underlies the antic banter of its characters. Harling's play, of course, was the source of the 1989 all-star film adaptation, a beloved and indispensible classic of its genre. It's the perfect ladies' night outing! For young theatregoers, we offer a Theatre for Young Audiences production of Seussical, revived from last season's Mainstage and featuring an adult cast, Feb. 23 - March 4, 2007. Ahrens and Flaherty's whimsical, tuneful delight features characters and stories from many of your favorite Dr. Seuss stories. The students of the Civic Theatre School will present The Wizard of Oz, April 27 - May 5, 2007. Join Dorothy and all her friends in their voyage through Oz to the Emerald City, and experience one of our favorite stories, live on stage! Also coming up: A Lehigh Valley Christmas In Concert, our annual V-Day event, a Resident Company showcase, and more! Sign up for the mailing list online or call (610) 432-8943 to receive your season brochure!