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“All Tony Award Winners, All the Time!” That could certainly be the motto for Hawthorne Players’ 2011 Season.  The acclaimed local theatre company is presenting three American plays this season and each one was awarded a Tony as the best play/musical of its season.  Good seats for this extraordinary series are still available for new Hawthorne season subscribers.

All three plays have one more thing in common—they are all set in New York.  Things get underway in April with Neil Simon’s 1991 “Lost in Yonkers.”  America’s great comic playwright set this autobiographical play in Yonkers in 1942.  Bella is 35 years old, mentally challenged and living at home with her mother, stern Grandma Kurnitz. As the play opens, ne’er do-well son Eddie deposits his two young sons on the old lady’s doorstep. The boys are left to contend with Grandma, with Bella and her secret romance, and with Louie, her brother, a small-time hood in a strange new world called Yonkers.

The July/August summer musical takes us back to New York during the Great Depression. Leapin’ Lizards! The popular comic strip heroine “Annie”  takes centerstage in one of the world’s best-loved musicals. Annie is a spunky Depression-era orphan determined to find her parents, who abandoned her years ago on the doorstep of a New York City orphanage run by the cruel, embittered Miss Hannigan. In adventure after fun-filled adventure, Annie foils Miss Hannigan’s evil machinations, befriends President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and finds a new family and home in billionaire Oliver Warbucks, his personal secretary Grace Farrell and a lovable mutt named Sandy!

In November, Hawthorne brings us the 1986 Tony Award winner, “I’m Not Rappaport” by Herb Gardner, playwright of “A Thousand Clowns.”  The rambunctiously funny story takes place under a bridge in Central Park, where two octogenarians, one white, one black, meet regularly, determined to fight off all attempts to put them out to pasture.

Season tickets are only $35 for adults/$32 for older adults and students, and can be purchased by calling (314) 524-5201 or (314) 921-5678.  More information can be found at www.hawthorneplayers.com or by email at hawthorneplayers@att.net.

Season ticket subscribers will also have the opportunity to secure tickets at special rates for Hawthorne’s highly popular production of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” to be presented in December. Special group rates are also available for individual shows.

One of the oldest theatre companiies in St. Louis, Hawthorne produced its first show in 1945, and since 1973 has mounted its productions in the lovely Florissant Civic Center Theatre, Parker Road and Waterford Drive.  Last summer’s smash hit “The Producers” was just nominated for 13 Best of Season awards by Arts for Life.

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