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The Alliance Theatre is a theater company in Atlanta, Georgia, based at the Alliance Theatre, part of the Robert W. Woodruff Arts Center, and is the winner of the 2007 Regional Theatre Tony Award. The company, originally the Atlanta Municipal Theatre, staged its first production at the Alliance in 1968. The following year the company became the Alliance Theatre Company.
Within a decade, the company had grown tremendously and staged the world premiere of Tennessee Williams' Tiger Tail and was casting such well-known actors as Richard Dreyfuss, Morgan Freeman, Jane Alexander, Paul Winfield, Robert Foxworth, Jo Van Fleet and Cybill Shepherd. Other world premieres included Ed Graczyk's Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.
With the arrival of Kenny Leon as artistic director in 1988, the company began a period of diversification and growth. Leon's work attracted a larger African-American audience by staging a more diverse selection of productions. During Leon's tenure, the company staged premieres of Pearl Cleage's Blues for an Alabama Sky, Alfred Uhry's The Last Night of Ballyhoo, Sandra Deer's So Long on Lonely Street, and Elton John and Tim Rice's musical Aida which went on to Broadway and won the Tony award for Best Original Musical Score. When Leon resigned from the company in 2000, Susan V. Booth became artistic director. Under her direction, the company produced the Broadway-bound production of the musical The Color Purple, and in 2007 presented Sister Act the Musical.
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