Loveless has spent a decade of philandering debauchery, sleeping his way across Europe, but has returned to England at the beginning of Amy Freed’s hilarious new play Restoration Comedy, which she based on two little-known Restoration-era plays, John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse and Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift. Loveless’ friend Worthy seeks to reunite him with his still virtuous wife, Amanda. But given the sexually frivolous, witty and satirical style of these late-17th Century plays, the reunion is beset by intrigue and delightfully wicked games played out by characters such as Lord Foppington, Narcissa, Fistula, Hillaria and Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, among others. Amy Freed (The Beard of Avon) has created memorable characters with pyrotechnic wit, set them in this saucy and opulent era, and unleashed a new comic invention.

Urged by his wife, his own “vaulting ambition,” and foretold by prophecy, Macbeth commits regicide in order to ascend to the throne of Scotland. Bloody daggers, witches and ghosts haunt this epic tale where “Fair is foul and foul is fair” as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth play out their destiny, unable to contain their lust for power. A masterpiece of tragedy, amid the violence and exotic locales and characters, Shakespeare offers frightening and astonishing insights into the passion for political and military power, and the consequences of corrupting power and ambition unchecked by morality or conscience.

Suddenly on the Warner Brothers' set of Max Reihardt’s 1934 remake of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a cosmic accident occurs and the “real” Oberon and Puck appear, having gotten confused on their way back from “A forest near Athens.”  This event creates the comic collision between the Golden Age of Hollywood and Shakespeare’s poetic comedy.  This stylish show-biz send up features Hollywood legends such as James Cagney, Dick Powell, and Mickey Rooney and 1930’s Hollywood figures such as gossip columnist Louella Parsons and film censor William Hayes.  Ken Ludwig’s (Lend Me A Tenor, Crazy for You) prodigious talent for farce is perfectly situated in this fantasy clash of screwball comedy and classic romance.

Can America become a dictatorship? That's the question Nobel prize-winning author Sinclair Lewis investigates in his darkly humorous 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, a fantasy of a fascist takeover of the U.S. UConn’s renowned puppet arts program is known for taking exciting source material such as Lewis’ novel and creating vivid and electrifying original puppet theatre productions. Using an uncommon combination of marionette and rod puppetry, this production will explore the dangers of taking freedom for granted, and our human responses to threats to our basic freedoms, and the resulting power struggles.

The workers in a frozen fish processing plant in Gloucester, MA confront the bleak economic future of their industry and threats to their jobs each in their own way, including sarcastic humor and some hilarious one-liners, in Israel Horovitz’s 1988 play about the individual human impact of fading industries, such as the fishing and fish packing industries in Gloucester, MA.  Horovitz’s play presaged, in many ways, the growing trend toward globalization and was made into a major motion picture in 1998 starring Mercedes Ruehl, Peter Riegert and Tony Danza.

Kander and Ebb’s hit musical classic Cabaret is set in Berlin at the beginning of the rise of the Third Reich and follows the story of Sally Bowles, an English cabaret performer, and her torrid love affair with American writer Clifford Bradshaw.  Much of the story unfolds through song and dance in the divinely decadent Kit Kat Club, including such memorable hits as “Cabaret” and “Money Makes the World Go Around,” performed by a live orchestra.  The turbulent love affair forms the base for this powerful story; a penetrating gaze at a troubled era that lyricist Fred Ebb described as, “people dancing on the edge of a cliff and not quite falling over.”  The show helped launch the careers of entertainment legends Joel Grey (as the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club) in the original Broadway show, and Liza Minnelli, as Sally Bowles in the 1972 movie directed by Bob Fosse.

The original Broadway production won eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical and Best Composer & Lyricist for Kander and Ebb. They later won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the 21st Annual Kennedy Center Honors celebration.