Artistic directors of Texas theaters don’t usually program theme seasons, but talking to Stages Artistic Director Derek Livingston reveals certain patterns in the work he’s excited to bring to Houston audiences. The lineup boasts a diversity of offerings from recent Broadway musicals to quiet, reflective plays, yet Livingston finds many of these shows depict the power of community or history made human.
“What does it mean to be human, and what does it mean to support each other? These three shows do this in three different ways, but they are all ensemble pieces that are about community, and they are musicals—and I love a good musical.”
He’s also scheduled them as a beginning, middle, and end to the season, with the Tony nominated Come from Away opening the fall and Once on this Island the penultimate show of the year in late May, 2027.
Come from Away is likely one of the biggest gets of the season. A hit on Broadway and then as a touring musical, it remained out of regional theaters’ reach for years. When I asked Livingston if there was anything he learned last year from programming his first full season at Stages, he joked that snagging the rights to shows he wants for Stages audiences immediately has become a top priority.
“You’re going to be closer to that story in a way that even if you’ve seen it on Broadway, seen the tour, you have not been close to,” says Livingston on why he’s excited to bring it to the 250 seat Sterling stage. “It’ll be the same great storytelling, but we can really lean into the intimacy of it, the closeness of it, because it’s a beautiful story.”
While he’s not directing, Livingston feels a personal connection to the final musical of the season, the lovely and sad Once on This Island, as he was involved in the casting for the original Off-Broadway production. A kind of Caribbean fairytale, loosely inspired by The Little Mermaid, Island also delves into issues of class and color barriers and the loving sacrifices that can ultimately tear those walls down for a community.
In between these two great musicals, Stages gives a holiday gift to audiences with the very irreverent Great American Trailer Park Christmas Musical. Several years ago, Stages debuted this seasonal addition to the Trailer Park theatrical universe, and subscribers have been clamoring for a return to Armadillo Acres, a mobile-living community, where family melodrama and a bout of amnesia can’t keep its denizens from supporting each other in the end.
The first play of the season, Jen Silverman’s The Roommate also has some of that community spirit, even in a community of two. The story about two middle aged women with very different personalities became a major hit when revived recently on Broadway.
“On the surface, it seems like a female Odd Couple, but the friendship and relationship between these women is so much deeper than that.”
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Elissa Cuellar and Sophia Marcelle in the Stages production of that drive thru monterey. Photo by Melissa Taylor.
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Carolyn Johnson and cast in the Stages production of Das Barbecü. Photo by Melissa Taylor.
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Stages Artistic Director Derek Charles Livingston. Photo courtesy of Stages.
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Pamela Vogel, Gabriel Regojo, Deshae Lashawn and Jillian Linton in the Stages production of It’s a Wonderful Life. Photo by Melissa Taylor.
Though falling into a diversity of genres, the remainder of the plays in the lineup explore moments in history from unique perspectives with perhaps Come from Away overlapping with these themes, as well.
In 2027, Livingston will direct two of those depictions of the past, beginning with The Mountaintop. Playwright Katori Hall’s Pulitzer Prize play imagines the evening in 1968 after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “Mountaintop” speech, the night before he was assassinated.
Livingston says that even though the play is Katori’s imagining of King’s thoughts and conversations those few hours before he was torn from the world, the play helped him come to an even greater regard for King the human being.
“I think if other audience members can walk away with just an appreciation of the sacrifices people in that kind of position have to make in order to make our world better, then this play will have done its job.”
To close out the 26-27 season, he’ll also direct, Silent Sky, playwright Lauren Gunderson’s portrait of early 20th century astronomer Henrietta Leavitt, whose discoveries helped us understand the vastness of the universe. Livingston plans to use projections and music in the Sterling theater to portray some of that vastness, while exploring the poignant moments of Leavitt’s life.
In between the revelations of Mountaintop and Sky, lies the comic horizon of Latin History for Morons. After his son is bullied, playwright and actor John Leguizamo created this one-man show as a history lesson, framed around his deep dive into the peoples and achievement of indigenous Americans across two continents that he, and we, were likely not taught in school.
The season will also continue Stages’ tradition of offering special programming add-ons, usually fun one-actor shows that arrive at Stages mostly fully formed and ready to be performed. The Late Night Catechism series has been a best seller with the company over the years, and this season they’ll welcome back Sister for Las Vegas: Sister Rolls the Dice! and Irish Catechism shows. For summer 2027, actor and writer Charles Ross will explore a galaxy far, far away in his comic One Man Star Wars Trilogy. But for summer 2026 programming, longtime Houston artist Holland Vavra has created the cabaret show Broadway and Beyond: From Opening Nights to Encores especially for Stages audiences.
This second year at Stages has taught Livingston that Houston and especially Stages’ audiences welcome such a multiplicity of shows in every season.
“Our audiences are willing to go along with something that is a little more serious. The balance between the well-known and the slightly edgier or less populist, if you will, is okay for us.”
—TARRA GAINES
