Next Season's Signature, Underlined With a Flourish

Signature Theatre will open its next season -- the first for the Arlington-based company in its new venue in Shirlington Village -- with the one-two musical punch of Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" (Sept. 5-Oct. 8) and Lerner and Loewe's "My Fair Lady" (Nov. 7-Dec. 10).

Construction delays had kept the company from taking up residence in its new digs at the end of this season, but Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer is optimistic about an August move.

He chose Sondheim's rumination on Grimm's fairy tales to kick off the season so "we could really get kids and families and just everybody in there to see it and see the space." He'll direct "Into the Woods," as he did at Signature 11 years ago.

The company had a time getting the rights for "My Fair Lady," considered by many the pinnacle of the musical theater genre. In keeping with Signature's mission to reimagine shows on a more intimate scale, the production is "not going to be the normal 'My Fair Lady,' " Schaeffer says. "There are certain restrictions that the estate has put on us, so it's little bit tricky." A director is to be announced.

Schaeffer will stage the world premiere of "Saving Aimee" (Jan. 23-Feb. 25), a musical about the checkered life of early-20th-century evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson. He already has workshopped it with its writer-lyricist, Kathie Lee Gifford. The music is by David Pomeranz and David Friedman.

Under the heading of the Female British Invasion, Signature will present two plays: "Crave" (Oct. 3-Dec. 3, 2006) and "Susanna Cox" (April 3-April 29, 2007). "Susanna Cox," commissioned from British writer Bathsheba Doran, delves into the true story of a Mennonite woman executed for infanticide in 1809 in Pennsylvania. Schaeffer will direct. "Crave" a series of intense monologues about love, longing and loss by the late Sarah Kane, a former classmate of Bathsheba Doran, will be presented in the smaller, 99-seat performance space.

As part of the Shakespeare in Washington festival, Signature will bring in the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv to perform "Hamlet" (March 6-11, 2007) as a special event. The production, in Hebrew with a projected English translation, will be acted on stages placed among the audience, who will sit on swivel chairs.

Actor Martin Moran will perform his Obie-winning one-man show, "The Tricky Part" (April 10-May 6, 2007). In it, he recalls sexual abuse at a Catholic boys camp and his efforts to look back at the experience and his life afterward.

Four cabarets also are planned for the smaller space, including "Singing Shakespeare" (March 7-10, 2007).

Researching Hamlet

Actor Karl Miller has spent the better part of a year researching "Hamlet," from its grand themes to its punctuation. He'll play the title role at Rep Stage in Columbia on Friday through April 9. "I've played a lot of crazy people and neurotic people and evil people in my time . . . this is just very different," he says.

Nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for his performance as a teen killer in "columbinus" at Round House Silver Spring, Miller says he "started out doing naturalism, and it takes a long time to reverse that hard-wiring." His research began with "the biggest and the broadest and the most abstract and thematic studies of the play and then focused even tighter on the actual technique and delivery." He went back to basics, "learning how to say a consonant and a vowel."

He tried to absorb fully the idea that in Shakespeare all you ever need is right there in the text -- not between the lines. "Shakespeare's genius lies in the fact that he was writing in a time when psychology and emotion and thought and speaking were all bound in one activity," Miller says. In modern life, he notes, "very rarely do we directly express how we feel at this moment, and in Shakespeare, that's all that's happening."