By Leslie Simon

The productions in the Arvada Center's 2024-2025 Theatre Season are all stories that break narratives and upend expectations. They're also all adaptations from other popular works that you may recognize! Sometimes the best stories on stage started out as beloved books and films. Read on to learn more about where these great productions started out. Have you read or seen any of these stories before?

Waitress - Waitress the musical is based on the 2007 indie film Waitress that was written and directed by Adrienne Shelly. Produced with a $1.5 million budget, the film Waitress starring Keri Russell (Felicity, Mission Impossible III) had box office success, making over $23 million globally. Tragedy unfortunately struck when Waitress creator Adrienne Shelly (pictured here) was found dead shortly after her film was accepted into the Sundance Festival. While police originally thought she had committed suicide, a construction worker in her office building later confessed to her murder. 

Despite this sad turn of events, the film went on to win hearts, and the Broadway musical adaptation was created in 2015 with a book by Jessie Nelson and music and lyrics by Grammy-nominated pop songwriter Sara Bareilles. 

Dracula: A Feminist Revenge Fantasy, Really - In Kate Hamill’s feminist adaptation of Bram Stoker’s horror classic Dracula that opened in 2020 at Classic Stage Company, she confronts the sexism in the original literature, spinning it so that it is female-centered and the women are fully empowered. There are no damsels in distress here! In Hamill’s story, Jonathan Harker is the bitten one under Dracula’s spell while wife Mina is the one fighting back with the assistance of vampire-hunter Van Helsing (who is also a woman in this version). This is the Dracula that you want to bring your fierce daughters to see.

Once Upon a Mattress - Based on the 1835 Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Princess and the Pea, this adaptation was pumped full of humor and laughs galore.  Originally written as a short play for the Tamiment adult summer camp resort, it was expanded and made its Off-Broadway debut in 1959, moving on to Broadway later that year. With music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and a book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller, and Marshall Barer, Once Upon a Mattress introduced Carol Burnett in her Broadway debut. There have been several successful revivals since then, including the current one on Broadway, and the Arvada Center’s production promises to be a wacky, hilarious time for the whole family. 

Clybourne Park - This 2010 play by Bruce Norris is loosely inspired by Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, the first play written by a Black woman to be produced on Broadway that starred Sidney Poitier in the original production. In A Raisin in the Sun, a Black family is looking to move into the white neighborhood of Clybourne Park. In Clybourne Park, it’s fifty years later and the neighborhood is now all-Black. Both plays present uncomfortable truths about assimilation, racism, and gentrification, connected together through the character Karl who was the antagonist in A Raisin in the Sun.

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A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder - British writer Roy Horniman’s 1907 fictional novel Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal has been adapted several times, including being the inspiration for the 1949 cult favorite film Kind Hearts and Coronets. In this murderous and biting comedy, we find ourselves rooting for a serial killer - but in a light, witty way of course! The book follows the criminal career of Israel Gascoyne Rank and his quest to gain a title for himself - much like Monty Navarro in A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.

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