Williamstown Theatre Festival Announces 2011 Main Stage Lineup

Jenny Gersten, the new artistic director of the Williamstown Theatre Festival, has announced her first season of Main Stage programming at the popular summer theater in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

The season will begin on July 1 with You Can’t Take it With You, the classic comedy by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman, directed by Tony nominee Christopher Ashley (Xanadu, Memphis). Mayhem ensues when the daughter of the colorful, freethinking Sycamore family brings her fiancé and his conservative, straight-laced parents to dinner on the wrong night. This Pulitzer Prize-winning play will run through July 23, ahead of a reported Broadway transfer in August to a Shubert theater to be announced.

Next up will be Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, a raucous Restoration comedy of mistaken identity starring Jonathan Patrick Walker, Brooks Ashmanskas, Paxton Whitehead and Kristine Nielsen. Former Williamstown Theatre Festival artist director Nicholas Martin will helm the piece, which will run July 27-August 7.

The season’s final main stage production will be Ten Cents a Dance, a celebration of the songs of Rodgers and Hart, conceived and directed by Tony-winner John Doyle. In Ten Cents a Dance, crooner Johnny wistfully recalls his lifelong love affair of chorus girl Miss Jones, who is embodied by five women, each portraying a different stage of her life. This world premiere production will feature actor/musicians Malcolm Gets, Lauren Molina and Jane Pfitsch.