Broadway in Chicago is set to announce tomorrow its full 2013 fall subscription season, to include appearances by the musical Once, winner of eight 2012 Tony Awards, as well as a touring production based on the recently closed 2012 revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita.

Also on the docket are Elf the Musical, a Broadway success in recent holiday season engagements; the stage adaptation of the 1983 film Flashdance; a new touring production of the 1989 biomusical Buddy—The Buddy Holly Story; and, as announced yesterday, a remount of TimeLine Theatre Company's To Master the Art.

So-called off-season specials, sold separately from the subscription season, include the return of Wicked (also announced earlier this week) as well as Emerald City Theatre's production of The Cat in the Hat and a brief touring stop of We Will Rock You, the Queen jukeboxer that's a long-running hit in London.

I'd call it a minor disappointment that the intimate Once, a major hit based on the 2006 Irish indie film, is staying just three weeks and in a theater more than twice the size of its Broadway house. But with The Book of Mormon presumably continuing into the fall—it's currently on sale through September 8, but it's telling that none of the nine shows I mentioned above are scheduled for the Bank of America Theatre—and Wicked taking up the Oriental Theatre for eight weeks, perhaps a longer sitdown for Once wasn't in the cards. Subscriptions go on sale March 22; complete dates and venues are after the jump.

Wicked, the musical phenomenon prequel to The Wizard of Oz that enjoyed a nearly four-year run at the Oriental Theatre from 2005 to 2009, will return for an eight-week engagement this fall, Broadway in Chicago says. An onsale date for individual tickets is yet to be announced.

Based on the novel by Gregory Maguire, Wicked imagines a pre-Dorothy backstory for the Wicked Witch of the West, Glinda the Good and several other characters familiar from L. Frank Baum's original and the 1939 MGM film.

The show has music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman; though it lost the 2004 Tony Awards for best musical, book and score to Avenue Q, Wicked has gone on to set box office records in a number of cities. The new stop by one of Wicked's touring companies will hit Chicago October 30–December 21, coinciding with the ten-year anniversary of the musical's Broadway production, which opened October 30, 2003 and is still running.

One of Wicked's lead producers, Marc Platt, is also the father of Ben Platt, who's starring as Elder Cunningham in the Chicago production of The Book of Mormon at the Bank of America Theatre, a few blocks south of the Oriental.

You can’t go wrong closing with Sinatra. There’s a case to be made, however, for Stanton Welch. Joffrey’s “American Legends,” a four-piece program, now running through Feb 24 at the Auditorium Theatre, concludes with Twyla Tharp’s popular Nine Sinatra Songs, but Welch’s Son of Chamber Symphony is the real treat of the evening. 

Sweet Charity is the type of dance-heavy musical that's a tight fit for Writers’ Theatre’s intimate Glencoe space, but Michael Halberstam’s revival is a dazzling success that doesn’t shy from the darker elements of the script. As Oscar Lindquist, the anxious everyman who finds the girl of his dreams in a broken elevator, Jarrod Zimmerman gives a performance that beautifully transitions from puppy love to engagement uncertainty. Raised in Marysville, Ohio, Zimmerman began performing in community theater as a child, the son of two fans of the arts who were fully supportive of their son pursuing a career as a performer. Zimmerman wanted to become a computer scientist after high school, but his parents convinced him that it was probably not a life he would enjoy. He studied theater at Northwestern University, and has since become a fixture on the Chicago stage, particularly in musicals. Zimmerman tells us about working with Writers’, the difficulty of performing a musical in a smaller space, and the ways in which he and Oscar are alike.