Jamie Lloyd will direct Evita at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in 2019, concluding the venue’s exciting newly-announced season.
Following on from recent triumphs with Jesus Christ Superstar – which returns to London next summer at the Barbican – and Little Shop Of Horrors, the Open Air Theatre’s season will conclude with another reinterpretation of a beloved musical: Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber‘s story of the iconic Argentine political leader Eva Perón.
The season will open with a rare revival of Thornton Wilder’s award-winning play Our Town (16 May – 8 June 2019), which tells the fictional story of a small American town through its residents’ everyday lives. The play won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and is directed by Ellen McDougall, Artistic Director of the Gate Theatre.
Furthering the 2018 collaboration which brought The Turn Of The Screw to Regent’s Park this year, the venue and the English National Opera then reunite to present Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera Hansel And Gretel (14 June – 22 June), based on the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale of the same name. The show will be directed by Open Air Theatre’s Artistic Director, Timothy Sheader.
The Turn Of The Screw at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre (Photo: David Jensen)
This is followed by award-winning director Dominic Hill bringing a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (28 June – 27 July) to the Open Air Theatre. Hill has previously won 5 Best Director awards in the Critics Award for Theatre in Scotland – more than any other director in the awards’ history – and is Artistic Director of the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow.
The season concludes with Lloyd’s revival of Evita (2 August – 21 September), with its chart-topping acclaimed score which includes numbers like Don’t Cry For Me Argentina, Oh! What A Circus, Another Suitcase In Another Hall and You Must Love Me. The show more than 20 major awards to its name, and in 1996 was adapted into an Oscar winning film version starring Madonna and Antonio Banderas.
Members’ priority booking for the new season opens next week, with public booking open on Tuesday 18 December.