Looking ahead: Theater ‘08 highlights

There are some theater treats heading our way in 2008. Here's a mere sampling.The show I'm most excited about also seems the furthest away. The national tour of the Tony Award-winning musical Spring Awakening is slated to start sometime in the second half of the year, courtesy of SHN/Best of Broadway. Spring Awakening was the best thing I saw on Broadway last year, and I eagerly anticipate the tour and the chance to hear the Duncan Sheik/Steven Sater score performed by exciting young singer/actors.A close second on the old excitement meter is Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking, her autobiographical solo show coming to Berkeley Rep in February.At SF Playhouse, Theresa Rebeck, a hot-hot playwright at the moment, arrives with the West Coast premiere of her The Scene starring ``Melrose Place'' alum (and Berkeley native) Daphne Zuniga. The show opens later this month.At American Conservatory Theater, the most intriguing offering this spring is 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, John Ford's Jacobean tragedy about a brother and sister who fall in love...with each other. The show begins performances in June.TheatreWorks in Mountain View ushers in the new year with Wendy Wasserstein's final play, Third, which begins performances next week. But the real excitement comes in April when the company mounts Caroline, or Change, the astonishing Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical.At Berkeley's Shotgun Players, the summer show will be Beowulf: A Thousand Years of Baggage, but the big excitement comes at the end of the year when director Mark Jackson (Death of Meyerhold) returns to take a whack at Macbeth in December.This summer, California Shakespeare Theater gives us some really good reasons to head into the Orinda hills: Jonathan Moscone directs Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband (July) and Timothy Near is directing Chekhov's Uncle Vanya (August).And this one is a little iffy, but should the fates conspire, Thick Description will bring back former Bay Area actor Colman Domingo (fresh from his Broadway turn in the musical Passing Strange) in his autobiographical solo show A Boy and His Soul. Proposed show run is July. Keep your fingers crossed.