The Public Theater's Full 2014/15 Season Announced
The off-Broadway non-profit Public Theater has announced its full 2014/15 season, will include three world premiere musicals and new plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, and Lemon Andersen.
The season will begin in September with the return of Public Works which features over 200 actors and community members in a free original musical adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale that will include music and lyrics by Todd Almond and run for three nights only, September 5-7, at the Delacorte Theater.
The season will then continue with Rock Bottom, created by Bridget Everett, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, and Matt Ray. This will run at Joe's Pub at The Public from 9 Sept to 11 Oct, with an official opening night on 17 Sept 2014. The story of what happens when you're too passionate to give up, and too big to fail, this new musical follows Bridget Everett wine bottle by wine bottle and man by man.
The first original musical in the season will be an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude which runs from 30 Sep to 2 Nov, with an official opening on 22 Oct 2014. Conceived and directed by Daniel Aukin, it features music and lyrics by Michael Friedman (Love's Labour's Lost, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and book by Itamar Moses, and tells the extraordinary coming-of-age story about 1970s Brooklyn and beyond - of black and white, soul and rap, block parties and blackouts, friendship and betrayal, comic books and 45s.
This will be followed by Pulitzer Prize Winner Suzan-Lori Parks' new play Father Comes Home from the Wars, which runs from 14 Oct to 16 Nov, with an official opening on 28 Oct 2014. Written in three separate parts, this is a dramatic work set over the course of the Civil War.
Straight White Men by Young Jean Lee will open on 17 Nov, following previews from 7 Nov and run through 7 Dec 2014. A conventionally structured take on the classic American father-son drama, the play will star Austin Pendleton, Scott Shepherd, Pete Simpson, and James Stanley as the family who are attempting to confront a problem that even being a happy can't solve: when identity is the cornerstone of one's worth.
Tony and Grammy Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda's new musical Hamilton will be the first show of 2015, beginning performances on 20 Jan through 22 Feb, with an official opening on 17 Feb 2015. The musical follows the scrappy young immigrant who forever changed America, Alexander Hamilton, from bastard orphan to Washington's right hand man, rebel to war hero, loving husband caught in the country's first sex scandal to Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy. Inspired by the book "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow, this eagerly anticipated new musical is directed by Thomas Kail.
Stew and Heidi Rodewald, together with director Joanna Settle bring their new musical The Total Bent to the Public from 3 Mar to 5 Apr, opening officially on 19 Mar 2015. The show follows a British record producer who arrives in Montgomery, Alabama to hook Marty Roy, a young black musical prodigy rebelling from the constraints of the world around him, he launches us back into Marty's tumultuous musical upbringing. What follows is a musical about the passions that divide a father and son as they make their music and make their choice between salvation and selling out.
The season concludes with a new play by spoken word artist and Tony Award-winning writer Lemon Andersen. Toast weaves major characters from black oral narratives into a story about a group of inmates fighting to keep their minds free amidst the 1971 riots that rocked Attica Prison. Developed, in part, at the Sundance Institute Theatre Program, the play runs from 3 to 19 April with an official opening on 13 April 2015.
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