Tony Winner Brings Broadway to Cozy Venue
By Mark Lowry, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
Jun. 6–Irving’s invaluable Lyric Stage, devoted to new and rarely staged musicals, marks its 15th anniversary when its 2008-09 season opens in September. To celebrate, it has booked an important guest for a preseason bash: Fort Worth’s Tony-winning actress Betty Buckley.
Buckley will stage the North Texas premiere of her new show, Broadway by Request, which she debuted at Feinstein’s in New York in February. The three local performances, at the Irving Arts Center’s 253-seat Dupree Theater, will be July 9-11.
The actress — who co-stars in the new M. Night Shyamalan film The Happening, opening June 13 — will perform big Broadway hits, including Memory from Cats and With One Look from Sunset Boulevard, with her pianist Seth Rudetsky. Buckley has appeared several times at Bass Hall, with the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra and with her jazzy arranger Kenny Werner, but she hasn’t done an intimate, straight-up Broadway concert in these parts in a long while.
Ticket buyers save $20 if they also subscribe to Lyric’s season, which opens and closes with classic musicals performed with full orchestras: West Side Story (Sept. 5-14) and The King and I (June 19-28, 2009). In between these are two rarely staged musicals, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Fiorello! (Oct. 10-25) and Irving Berlin’s As Thousands Cheer (April 24-May 9), as well as a special engagement with another Broadway star, Donna McKechnie (Jan. 30-31).
Broadway by Request
8 p.m. July 9-11 at Dupree Theater at the Irving Arts Center, 3333 N. MacArthur Blvd., Irving
$55; $35 for Lyric Stage subscribers
972-252-2787; www.lyricstage.org
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Copyright (c) 2008, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Texas
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