LAKEWOOD THEATRE COMPANY PRESENTS
BY JEEVES
OCTOBER 25 – 26, 2024

To purchase tickets CLICK HERE.

3 Performances Only! Friday at 7:00PM and Saturday at 2:00 & 7:00PM

By Jeeves features music by Andrew Lloyd Webber and lyrics and book by Alan Ayckbourn.

By Jeeves is curated abd directed by Dennis Corwin and the musical director is Jeffrey Michael Kauffman.The series sponsor is Fritz Camp, the playbill sponsors are Ed and Judy McKenney and the music sponsor is Jack’s Overhead Door.

The cast includes Blake Isaac, Russ Cowan, Landy Lamb, Dylan Anthony Macabitas, Richie Stone, Dan Bahr, Kylie Jenifer Rose, Lindsay Reed, Robert Altieri, and Will Shindler.

The Story: When Bertie Wooster’s (Blake Isaac) banjo mysteriously disappears just as he is about to give a concert in a church hall, his quick-witted and unflappable manservant Jeeves (Russ Cowan) suggests that he entertain his audience by relating the hapless romantic misadventures of his circle of high-society London cronies. An Andrew Lloyd Webber musical written before his productions of Cats and Phantom of the Opera.

All Tickets: $20.00. CLICK HERE to order online.

Lakewood Theatre Company’s Side Door Stage is located in the Community Meeting Room at Lakewood Center for the Arts, 368 S. State Street in Lake Oswego. Special note: for this production food will be available for purchase before the performance from the Up ’N Smoke Bbq Pit Food Truck.  Beverages will also be available to purchase before and during the show.

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About  – By Jeeves
In 1996, Alan Ayckbourn and Andrew Lloyd Webber unveiled their – mostly – new musical By Jeeves. It was a practically a complete re-write of their flop 1975 West End musical Jeeves and its fortunes could not have been more different.

Jeeves, the original incarnation of the concept, was a musical inspired by the novels of P.G. Wodehouse with book and lyrics by Alan Ayckbourn and music by Andrew Lloyd Webber. It closed in London May 24, 1975 after just 38 performances. It was a financial loss and critical notices were harsh. That, realistically, should have been the end of Jeeves.

Over the next 20 years, however, both Ayckbourn and Lloyd Webber toyed with the idea of restating the piece but in different way. The result was By Jeeves: a small-scale staging using a small ensemble with a new book and score. In this revised version a new mistaken-identity plot was created that was not based on any single Wodehouse work. It instead contained elements from various Wodehouse’s novels alongside an original Ayckbourn-created antagonist. The By Jeeves version incorporated six songs from the original Jeeves  along with five brand new songs and featured a smaller cast of 10.

This new reformulation went on to become the inaugural show at the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough on April 24,1996. It had very favorable reviews and ran with a sellout run. Upon its closing in Scarborough, the production transferred to the West End in the summer of 1996 where it ran for more than seven months before going on a UK tour. During the same year, Ayckbourn adapted and directed it for BBC Radio and a second cast album was recorded for the West End production. In the United Sates By Jeeves opened on Broadway in October 2001 for a 3-month run directed by Alan Ayckbourn. The show, however, almost didn’t open. Two investors withdrew their support owing to economic jitters after the September 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. By September 18, however, Lloyd Webber stepped in with replacement investors and the show was again scheduled for its October opening with mostly favorable reviews.