American Folklore Theatre Announces 2008 Season

American Folklore Theatre (AFT) is pleased to announce its 2008 summer season, which will run from June 18 until August 30, featuring AFT audience favorites Fishing for the Moon, Lumberjacks in Love, and A Cabin with a View. AFT has also announced its fall season, which will include Sometimes a Song: The Music of Dan Fogelberg from September 5 through October 25 and And If Elected from October 23 until November 2.

Fishing for the Moon, one of the oldest plays to be revived in 2008, is historic in two senses of the word: not only did the play (which premiered in 1992) mark the first collaboration between longtime AFT writer Fred Alley and composer James Kaplan, it is also set in the 19th century, against the background of post-Civil War Reconstruction. A lighthearted romantic comedy, the play traces the confusion that results when a gentleman from Georgia comes to small-town Wisconsin looking for a Union army officer who runs his farm like an army camp.

The second Alley-Kaplan collaboration that will grace the AFT amphitheatre this summer is Lumberjacks in Love, a perennial favorite that premiered in 1996 and has since been revived not only in Peninsula State Park, but at numerous other theaters across the country, drawing sellout audiences along the way. The play tells the tale of four burly lumberjacks who live in a blissful state of unperturbed masculinity-or so they think, until a mail-order bride appears, bringing the feminine into the men’s bachelor-pad lumber camp.

A Cabin with a View, written by Dave Hudson and Paul Libman (the team that brought AFT Muskie Love and Richard Rodgers award-winner Main-Travelled Roads), returns for a second year of performances under the stars after playing to packed houses in 2007. A Cabin with a View tells the story of Lucy, a UW student who in 1959 has recently been "pinned" by campus hotshot Chip Davis and is well on her way to a life of security and tradition. But when Lucy takes a summer trip to the Lazy Rapids Ranch and encounters a beatnik poet named George, her formerly steady worldview is shaken.

After Labor Day, AFT will move indoors to begin performances of Sometimes a Song: The Music of Dan Fogelberg at the Ephraim Village Hall. A brand-new concert show in the style of AFT hits Old Friends and Goodnight Irene, Sometimes a Song will spotlight the talents of Scott Wakefield, Claudia Russell and Paul Helm, as they bring fresh interpretations to Fogelberg’s classic songs, including "Leader of the Band" and "Auld Lang Syne." In late October, just in time for this fall’s elections, AFT will present And If Elected, a hilarious, tuneful romp through the history of the American presidential election. Performances of And If Elected will take place at Gibraltar Town Hall and the Third Avenue Playhouse in Sturgeon Bay.

Tickets will go on sale May 1 in the AFT box office at the Green Gables shops in north Ephraim, via phone at 920.854.6117, and online at http://www.folkloretheatre.com. All summer performances take place under the stars in the stunning amphitheatre at Peninsula State Park.