“Forgotten Hollywood”- Cheers Live on Stage…

Posted on June 20, 2016 by raideoman1 | No Comments

Manny P. here…

Cheers_intro_logo   The bar where everybody knows your name is ready to go on tour. Cheers Live on Stage is a comedy based on some of the most memorable moments of the celebrated television show’s first season. It will feature retired Red Sox pitcher, and shameless lady’s man, Sam Malone, pretentious waitress Diane Chambers, rotund barfly Norm Peterson, idiotic mailman Cliff Clavin, and the rest of the first season cast when it debuts in September in Boston.

The show will have a cast of 14 actors — although no original cast members are involved — but to lend a little authenticity to a typical neighborhood bar, director Matt Lenz is planning what he says is an unusual casting call. Every night, he will bring about 10 pre-selected members of the audience to be on stage with the cast as bar patrons. They’ll be dressed in 1980s fashions and given directions, perhaps walking onstage to sit at a table, order a drink, then head upstairs to Melville’s, the restaurant above the bar. The stage set will appear almost identical to the television show, and producers plan to use the original theme music.

   Even though it’s based on the sitcom set in a Boston bar, loyal fans should see plenty of new material in the stage version, and may even get a chance to be a part of each performance. A national tour is also planned. Fans will get their fill of all of their favorite Cheers characters, but because the two-hour show is based solely on the first season, there will be no Woody, Frasier, or Rebecca.

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   Erik Forrest Jackson, the writer who adapted the show for the theater, binge-watched all 22 episodes of the first season, and studied the original scripts before he started writing. The quality of the original is what  made a live reboot attractive to Randy Buck, the chief executive officer of Troika Entertainment, which is producing the show along with Stageworks MediaTroika traditionally brings Broadway musicals on the road, but barely hesitated when given the chance to get involved in the Cheers project.

   The television series ran for 11 seasons from 1982 until 1993, winning 28 Emmys and six Golden Globes, and is found on just about every list of the top small screen programs in history.

   Cheers to a potentially fruitful endeavor

Until next time>                               “never forget”

This entry was posted on Monday, June 20th, 2016 at 12:01 am and is filed under Blog by Manny Pacheco. You can follow any comments to this post through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


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