Chugging ahead with pandemic recovery, San Francisco Playhouse is producing six shows, including works by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Paula Vogel and Tony Award winner and Stanford graduate David Henry Hwang, in its 2022-23 season.
The 20th anniversary lineup, which the Union Square company announced Monday, April 4, commences with Vogel’s “Indecent” (Sept. 22-Nov. 6), which ran on Broadway in 2017. The play dramatizes the 1923 Broadway production of Sholem Asch’s “The God of Vengeance,” which was blasted at the time as “indecent,” among other epithets, for its portrayals of lesbian love and Jewish prostitution.
Up next is Shaina Taub’s musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” (Nov. 17-Jan. 14), which follows the company’s gorgeous production of Taub’s“Twelfth Night”this winter. The new year brings the world premiere of Claude Jackson Jr.’s “Cashed Out” (Jan. 26-Feb. 25), about a Native American woman with a gambling addiction.
“Clue” (March 9-April 22), based on the 1985 movie inspired by the board game, brings the company into spring, leading into “Chinglish” (May 4-June 10) by Hwang, of “M. Butterfly” and“Soft Power”fame. The 2011 play about the perils of linguistic and cultural translation was inspired by a visit Hwang made to China, where he saw ludicrously translated signs at a new arts center.
The season wraps up with “A Chorus Line” (June 22-Sept. 9), the 1975 James Kirkwood Jr., Nicholas Dante, Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban musical diving deep into the worries and hopes of a group of dancers auditioning for spots in a Broadway chorus as they move from thinking, “God, I hope I get it,” to performing the glitzy earworm “One.”
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Editor’s note: A previous version of this story misidentified the race of the main character in “Cashed Out.” She is Native American.