A look at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's 2009 season

Oregon Shakespeare Festival will offer Shakespeare classics, premiere dramas, a Broadway musical and more in its 2009 season in Ashland, Ore.

OSF artistic director Bill Rauch's second season at the helm contains "new directions we're trying," he says, including tackling a Broadway musical.

"The Music Man" is "a long-term passion project of mine," says Rauch, "and we'll offer a fresh take on it."

Also, the new "Don Quixote" production will mark "the first time a work by persons of color will be on our outdoor stage." The novel's author, Cervantes, was Spanish, and adapter Octavio Solis is Chicano.

Rauch also plans to explore Shakespeare's own era, in Bill Cain's "Equivocation." The fictional tale has Britain's King James I commissioning a play about the religiously motivated Gunpowder Plot of 1605, from Will of Avon.

The complete 2009 season:

Angus Bowmer Theatre

Shakespeare's "Macbeth"

"The Music Man" — the Broadway musical.

"Death and the King's Horseman" — a play by Wole Soyinka.

"Equivocation" — Bill Cain's drama receives its world premiere.

"Paradise Lost" — the rarely seen play by Clifford Odets.

New Theatre

"Dead Man's Cell Phone" — Sara Ruhl's recent comedy.

"The Servant of Two Masters" — Carlo Goldoni's farce.

Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well"

Elizabethan Stage

Shakespeare's "Henry VIII"

Shakespeare's "Much Ado About Nothing"

"Don Quixote" — world premiere of an adaptation by Octavio Solis.

Misha Berson, Seattle Times theater critic