SPARTANBURG, SC – The award-winning Proud Mary Theatre Company has proudly unveiled its third season of compelling stories about the LGBTQ+ community with a saucy lineup that includes everything from vintage campy vampire lesbians to fresh Broadway Elizabethan punk delivered by the ground-breaking 1980s all-women rock band The Go-Go’s.
“We have an incredibly appealing season this year,” said Artistic Director Sandy Staggs. ”From classic drag camp to the emotional, hilarious and heartfelt The Pink Unicorn, and the hot new Head Over Heels musical with a super-catchy score (and smashing arrangements) that people will remember from the 1980s, this season is definitely hip with crowd-pleasers across-the-board.”
The 2019-20 slate of shows begins in the Halloween season with the Upstate premiere of the 1984 classic campy romp through time, Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom, on October 25 – November 2 with some midnight shows planned.
Vampire Lesbians of Sodom centers on two eponymous immortal vampire lesbians locked in eternal, if comic, antagonism after surviving the downfall of the mythical Biblical city in question, and crossing paths again in 1920s/1930s Broadway/Hollywood, and for one final showdown in Las Vegas in the 1980s.
This play is an Official Upstate Pride Week Event!
Proud Mary Theatre Company’s road show this season beginning in February 2020 is a brand new play The Pink Unicorn that is currently having its Off-Broadway premiere with Tony-Winner Alice Ripley (Next to Normal). In this one-woman-show by Elise Forier Edie, a southern Christian widow’s life is suddenly upended when her 14-year-old daughter Jolene announces she is “gender queer” and starts a chapter of the Gay and Straight Alliance at Spartan High School (in Texas coincidentally).
Sordid Lives, the cult classic play that launched two films and a TV series by Del Shores is on the bill by popular demand in June 2020 after sold-out shows of his controversial Southern Baptist Sissies last summer. In this southern funeral comedy, a “colorful” family must come to grips with
their own demons and the accidental death of the elderly family matriarch during a clandestine meeting in a seedy motel room with her much younger, married neighbor.
Playwright Del Shores will be live in person next month on Sunday, June 23, 2019 @ 7 p.m. for “A Sordid Evening with Del Shores” as part of the Spartanburg Fringe Arts Festival. Tickets:
http://spartanburgfringefestival.com/event/a-sordid-evening-with-del-shores/
For its second-ever musical, the company will go Head Over Heels in August 2020 with the regional premiere of this bold new musical comedy from the visionaries that rocked Broadway with Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Avenue Q and Spring Awakening, follows the escapades of a royal family on an outrageous journey to save their beloved kingdom from extinction — only to discover the key to their realm’s survival lies within each of their own hearts. This laugh-out-loud love story is set to the music of the iconic 1980’s all-female rock band The Go-Go’s, including the hit songs, “We Got the Beat,” “Our Lips Are Sealed,” “Vacation,” Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and “Mad About You.”
The final play next year, The Pussy Grabber Plays: Stories Inspired by The Women Who Came Forward, also a regional premiere, is a fundraiser for local nonprofits, with 100 percent of the proceeds benefiting women’s causes, including those supporting lesbians and trans women.”
The Pussy Grabber Plays is a series of short plays created by some of the most highly acclaimed women writing for theater today. Based on interviews with seven of the 19 women who have spoken out about their encounters with Donald Trump, the plays offer insights into each woman’s life, her decision to stand up, and the fallout she’s faced. Laced with humor, fear, heartbreak and anger, The Pussy Grabber Plays is political theater at its best: telling the untold stories about women who have risked everything to speak truth to power. Special fundraiser! The Pussy Grabber Plays box office opens in summer 2020.
Season tickets are available now at http://www.proudmrytheatre.com/.