‘West Side Story’ opens Summer Repertory Theatre season in Santa Rosa

The Santa Rosa Junior College campus is always a busy place, but it gets an extra jolt of excitement every June with the opening of the Summer Repertory Theatre season.

For the annual program’s 46th outing, a company of 32 actors from colleges all over the country will present 80 performances of five plays on two stages, starting tonight and continuing through early August.

At first glance, the plays - “West Side Story,” “Chicago,” “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Clybourne Park” and “The Drowsy Chaperone” - may not seem to have much in common, but there is a pattern.

“These are well-loved and well-known shows for the most part,” said SRT artistic director James Newman. “But at the core, they’re telling stories of social significance. Themes of race and social injustice run throughout four out of five shows.”

The exception is “The Drowsy Chaperone,” a nostalgic musical, opening in late July. “That show is like a cherry on top at the end of the season,” he said.

Here’s Newman’s rundown of this season’s shows, listed by their opening dates:

June 16 - “West Side Story,” 1957, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by Arthur Laurents. Set in New York City in the 1950s, and inspired by William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” the story follows the clash between two rival street gangs, one of them Puerto Rican.

“‘West Side Story’ is a massive show,” Newman said. “It’s a story of race and immigration, with the tragic love story of Romeo and Juliet thrown into it. Most people - and I happen to be one of them - consider ‘West Side Story’ to be the greatest musical ever written.”

July 5 - “Chicago,” 1975, music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, book by Ebb and Bob Fosse.

Set in Prohibition-era Chicago, the musical is based on a 1926 play of the same name by Chicago Tribune reporter Maurine Dallas Watkins, dealing with crimes she reported on. In the musical, the fictional heroine, chorus girl Roxie Hart, is at the center of a sensational murder trial.

“You can’t look at ‘Chicago’ in this day and age without really examining the media, and how media plays a role in what we perceive as the truth, and how people used the both the media and truthfulness - or lies - to achieve their goals,” Newman said.

“There was a time when a pretty girl couldn’t get convicted of murder in Cook County and Chicago. That gets all jazzed up, obviously, with incredible songs and Bob Fosse dancing, but it’s a really powerful piece. ‘Chicago’ is not only a fun romp. It is very topical. And it has music that everyone knows and loves.”

July 5 - “A Raisin in the Sun,” 1959, written by Lorraine Hansberry. A low-income African-American family in Chicago struggles for a better life.

“‘A Raisin in the Sun’ is one of my all-time favorite plays,” Newman said. “And doing it with the companion piece, ‘Clybourne Park,’ in the same season, is a wonderful treat for audiences. You not only get the brilliance of this seminal work about the African-American experience. Then you get the other side of the coin in ‘Clybourne Park.’?”

(The role of the mother in this production of “A Raisin in the Sun” will be played by longtime Sonoma County actor Marjorie Crump-Shears, whose film credits include the 2013 real-life drama “Fruitvale Station,” based on the story of Oscar Grant, who was killed by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer in Oakland on New Year’s Eve 2009.)

July 24 - “Clybourne Park,” 2010, written by Bruce Norris. This drama frames the events of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” The first act is about a white couple planning to sell its home in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood to a black couple, the protagonists of “A Raisin the Sun.” The second act set 50 years later, in 2009, deals with a white couple try to buy the same home in what is now an all-black neighborhood.

“The play tackles not only the issue of gentrification, but what appeared at that point to be a ‘post-racial’ society. We put that in quotes now, because we all know that’s not actually accurate,” Newman said. “Our audiences will get to see ‘A Raisin in the Sun’ first, as they should, and I think seeing the two plays in order will mean more.”

July 24 - “The Drowsy Chaperone,” which premiered on Broadway in 2006, with book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar and music and lyrics by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison. As a middle-aged musical theatre fan as he plays the record of his favorite musical, the show comes to life onstage.

“It’s a love letter to the old-time musicals and it doesn’t take itself seriously. It’s light and carefree, but at the same time, it’s heart-warming and nostalgic, so I think it balances really nicely with the heaviness of ‘West Side Story.’?”

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at 707-521-5243 or dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @danarts.