For a summer, at least, the Guthrie Theater will become Berlin’s sultry, Weimar-era Kit Kat Klub.
The Minneapolis company has announced an eight-show 2024-25 roster of classics and new works, including John Kander and Fred Ebb’s musical “Cabaret,” the Tony-winning family saga “The Lehman Trilogy,” plus plays by Lloyd Suh, Pearl Cleage and Broadway star Patrick Page.
“I’m always excited to announce a new season but man, oh, man, this is thrilling,” said artistic director Joseph Haj.
Haj will direct both “Cabaret” (June 21-Aug. 24, 2025) and a reimagined “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that comes 10 years after Joe Dowling’s memorable staging of the Shakespearean comedy. Haj said that his vision for “Midsummer,” which he did for a COVID-19 aborted run at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2020, will lean into the various looks at marriage through all the couples in the play.
Programmatically, the theater has gotten back into a groove as it builds its season around tentpoles, including a summer musical, a winter mystery and, at the holidays, “A Christmas Carol,” which celebrates its 50th anniversary in 2024.
Those usual box office winners allow the company to do other types of shows as it draws audiences back after the depletions of the pandemic.
Things kick off with “Lehman,” Ben Power’s adaptation of Stefano Massini’s Tony-winning play about an immigrant family that builds the Lehman Brothers investment firm into a towering American dream over 163 years before it crashes and burns in 2008. While Sam Mendes directed the epic on Broadway, New York director Arin Arbus will stage it at the Guthrie (Sept. 14-Oct. 13).
The originator of the role of Hades in “Hadestown” and a replacement as Scar in “The Lion King,” Grammy-winner and Tony-nominee Page created “All the Devils Are Here: How Shakespeare Invented the Villain” to explore evil in the works of the Bard. “Devils” is still playing in New York, where its Simon Godwin-directed run was just extended. Page and Godwin will again team up at the Guthrie (Oct. 12-Nov. 17).
