'Chicago,' 'La Bohème' and new 'Twelve Angry Men' musical on tap for Theater Latté Da

Photo by Dan Norman

“All is Calm” returns as Theater Latté Da’s holiday offering.

Theater Latté Da fans can expect a double dose of acting duo Regina Marie Williams and Britta Ollmann in the 2019-20 season.

Ollmann starred in last year’s “Once,” the biggest hit in the Minneapolis theater’s 21-year history. She will team with Williams to open the season in “Chicago,” the John Kander/Fred Ebb musical that became an Oscar-winning movie (it’s currently in the public eye yet again as the focal point of current episodes of the FX series “Fosse/Verdon”). Featuring songs “All That Jazz” and “Cell Block Tango,” it’s the satiric story of two murderers who meet in a Chicago jail in the 1920s. Ollman plays Roxy Hart, one of the killers, while Williams makes her Latté Da debut as her jailer, Mama Morton (Sept. 18-Nov. 3).

Williams takes the title role in “Bernarda Alba,” an all-female chamber musical based on Federico García Lorca’s classic tragedy “The House of Bernarda Alba,” in which a Spanish matriarch attempts to cloister her five daughters after the death of her husband. Spoiler alert: It doesn’t work. The powerhouse cast also includes Latté Da vets Meghan Kreidler, Ann Michels, Sara Ochs and Ollmann. Mill City Summer Opera's Crystal Manich directs. (Jan. 15-Feb. 16, 2020).

Events shift to France for a return visit to “La Bohème,” which earned Latté Da an Ivey Award in 2005 for a production that zooms the opera from its original 1840s setting to the occupied Paris of the 1940s. The 2005 production was performed with an English translation. This time, it’ll be sung in Italian with English supertitles. The story of artsy youth, falling in love and struggling to survive is orchestrated for Parisian street instruments, including accordion, violin and clarinet (March 11-April 26, 2020).

Latté Da artistic director Peter Rothstein helms all but one of the season's titles, including a world premiere musical inspired by another classic. “Twelve Angry Men” by David Simpatico and Michael Holland (based on Reginald Rose’s 1950s teleplay) is set in a jury room where the acrimonious title characters settle the fate of a youth charged with murder (May 27-June 28. 2020).

Assuring that there’s at least one death in every Latté Da show next season, the company’s holiday offering is “All Is Calm: The Christmas Truce of 1914.” This tear-jerking favorite uses beloved songs to re-create a single day of peace on the front lines of World War I. A hit last year in New York, and an impossible-to-get ticket in its brief local appearance, “All Is Calm” returns much of its cast — including Sasha Andreev and Rodolfo Nieto — for a monthlong run (Nov. 27-Dec. 22).

The company’s annual festival of works-in-development, Next, also returns in July 2020.

Season tickets are currently on sale at 612-339-3003 or latteda.org.