2011-12 season preview: Art | Pop music | Dance

SEASON UPSIDE: Palm Beach Dramaworks moves into more spacious digs at the former Cuillo Centre for the Arts on Nov. 11.

SEASON DOWNSIDE: The loss of Florida Stage is still too painful.

The national tour of 'Hair' brings the '60s to the Kravis in January. (Photo by Joan Marcus)

HAIR
Jan. 10-15, Kravis Center, West Palm Beach

In 1968, in the midst of the Vietnam era, the counter-culture arrived on Broadway with this musical celebration of free love, the antiwar movement and flowing, frizzy hair. It took over 40 years — to another time that the nation was enmeshed in an unpopular war — for the show to return to Broadway. There it won the 2009 Best Revival Tony Award, thanks largely to the direction and restructuring of the story line by darling of the avant garde, Diane Paulus. That revival is now on tour, a likely highlight of the Kravis on Broadway series.

RED
Feb. 14-26, Maltz Jupiter Theatre
Emboldened by the success last season of Twelve Angry Men, the Maltz ventures further into the realm of drama with the 2010 Tony-winning Best Play by John Logan about abstract expressionist artist Mark Rothko and his creative process. Conflicted about a new commission to paint a series of canvasses for the then-new Four Seasons restaurant in New York, Rothko rants to his new assistant on the art of making art. A must-see for lovers of intense, articulate theater.

THE PITMEN PAINTERS
Feb. 17-March 11, Palm Beach Dramaworks, West Palm Beach
Dramaworks tends towards 20th-century American classics, but when artistic director Bill Hayes saw Lee Hall’s factual tale of British miners who take an art appreciation course, and, improbably, become world-famous painters, he knew he had to bring the play to South Florida. In the company’s first season in its new larger home on Clematis Street, the production will have more room to breathe.

WORKING
Feb. 26-April 1, Caldwell Theatre Co., Boca Raton
Jobs and the lack of them are on the nation’s mind, which led artistic director Clive Cholerton to select this cult musical revue from 1974, a celebration of working men and women adapted from interviews by Chicago’s Studs Terkel. The show lasted only 25 performances on Broadway initially, but regional productions have kept the show alive. Tales of waitresses and construction workers are now supplemented by sagas of outsourced tech support operators and a trucker with cellphone troubles in a decidedly more multicultural take on the working class.

URINETOWN
Jan. 20-29, Slow Burn Theater Co., Boca Raton
Offbeat and slyly satirical, this unconventional show spawned by the New York International Fringe Festival is the pseudo-Brechtian tale of an evil corporation’s attempt to control the world’s toilets, a plan that the show’s crusading hero is intent on thwarting. Between the lines are parodies of popular musicals, from West Side Story to Fiddler on the Roof.