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Arts & CultureTheater Notes

The T&G Present A Few Good Men


If time-travel technology ever becomes available to the common person within my lifetime, I know exactly what I’m going to do. I’ll leave it to other people to kill Hitler or warn Lincoln to duck. I’ll be marching into whatever meeting spawned the concept of Valentine’s Day and give those dillholes a piece of my mind. The middle of February? Really? A day devoted to emotional blackmail and pointless spending in the midst of the coldest, least sexy month on the calendar? Couldn’t wait ’til it warmed up and people are actually feeling it, could you?

So, if you wake up sometime and Valentine’s Day is in August, you’ll have me to thank. In the meantime, if you want to show your significant other some love, take him/her/them out to see some live theater in town, because there’s some great stuff hitting the stage in February.

Crowd-Pleaser: UGA Theatre presents the perennial favorite The Fantasticks, the longest-running musical in theater history. This show, about families who stage a grand deception to end a feud with a marriage, ran continuously on Broadway for 42 years and never fails to please audiences. Get tickets ASAP; this looks like a sellout.

The Fantasticks runs at the Seney-Stovall Chapel Tuesday–Sunday, Feb. 5–10, at 8 p.m., with a 2:30 p.m matinee on Sunday, Feb. 10. Tickets are $12 for the general public, $7 for students with ID, and can be ordered by phone at 706-542-4400 or 888-289-8497 (toll free), or purchased online at http://2012.pac.uga.edu/Calendar.aspx.

Family-Friendly: The touring company of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast will make a whistle-stop at the Classic Center. Rumor has it that this show is under the direction of the original producers of the wildly successful musical. You know the story, your kids know the story, and this promises to be a great night out for the whole family. The show is one night only, Friday, Feb. 8, at 8 p.m. Tickets run from $20 to $70 and are available at www.classiccenter.com.

You Can’t Handle the Truth: It’s been awhile since we’ve had a good old-fashioned courtroom drama in this town that didn’t involve five pounds of bacon and a can of pepper spray. Beginning Feb. 8, the Town & Gown Players present their production of Aaron Sorkin’s 1989 play A Few Good Men. Most of us, at least those of us with TBS, have seen the film with Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson and all the iconic yelling, but this is the play as Sorkin originally intended (when he sold the film rights, he demanded the producer stage the play as well) that asks this vital question: In the course of protecting American lives and treasure, which is more important to our military, the rule of law or the rule of order? This should be good.

A Few Good Men runs Friday–Sunday, Feb. 8–10, and Thursday–Sunday, Feb. 14–17, at Athens Community Theatre. Showtimes are 8 p.m., Thursday–Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday. Tickets are $15, $12 for students and seniors and may be purchased at www.showclix.com. 

Go, Girl: While most people in town will be trudging through the same old Valentine’s Day miasma—dress-up dinner, disproportionately expensive gift-giving, vaguely disappointing sex—you could go and experience something extraordinary and help benefit a good cause. This year’s annual performance of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues will be staged at the UGA Chapel Thursday–Sunday, Feb. 14–17 at 8 p.m. Readers and performers from across the Athens community spectrum will participate in what is always an intense and marvelous production. Tickets are $15 at the door, and all proceeds go to Project Safe.

Fresh Work: The UGA Theatre will stage Must Go On, a new play by University professor John Kundert-Gibbs, at the Cellar Theatre in the Fine Arts Building beginning Feb. 21. According to the Theatre and Film Studies website, this is “[a] high-energy farce that features a regional morning TV show on the morning that everyone learns the show has been cancelled. While the cast and crew try to keep up appearances on set, everything back stage, and eventually onstage, goes horribly wrong.” There is something very exciting about seeing a new work staged for the first time that adds to the theater-going experience, that sense of being let in on a secret before the rest of the world and bragging rights if the play becomes a hit. Go check this out.

Must Go On runs Thursday–Saturday, Feb. 21–23, and Wednesday–Sunday, Feb. 27–Mar. 3. All showtimes are at 8 p.m., except Mar. 3, at 2:30 p.m. Tickets are $16, $12 for students and may be purchased by calling 706-542-4400 or online at http://2012.pac.uga.edu/Calendar.aspx.

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