The Season Info:
CINCINNATI-New Stage Collective, Cincinnati’s award-winning theatre company dedicated to innovative and passionate theatre, celebrates the one-year anniversary operating in its permanent downtown performance space with the announcement of its new 2008-2009 season lineup, “New Stage in the City.”
After an incredibly successful 2007-2008 season—6 Acclaim Award wins to date; sell-out performances of Caroline or Change, Take Me Out, and Bug; and the crown jewel of the season, Jerry Springer: The Opera still to come—NSC’s Producing Artistic Director Alan Patrick Kenny has announced that in 2008-2009, New Stage will think even bigger.
“New Stage will celebrate being a permanent fixture in this city with an unprecedented lineup of eight blockbuster productions–incredibly innovative new works, important but neglected works, and reinvention of recent landmark works,” says Kenny.
The 2008-2009 New Stage Collective season, “New Stage in the City,” includes:
Shining City
a mystery
by Conor McPherson
September 4-21, 2008
NSC opens with celebrated young Irish playwright Conor McPherson’s (The Weir, The Seafarer, Port Authority) quietly haunting psychological mystery, Shining City. A struggling Dublin therapist is treating a man haunted by the ghost of his recently deceased wife, while at the same time the therapist's own relationship teeters on the brink. This finely wrought tale of urban isolation and connection comes to NSC after its critically acclaimed 2006 Broadway production.
“As close to perfection as contemporary playwriting gets. I was blown away. Conor McPherson’s new play is haunting, inspired, and absolutely glorious.”
-The New York Times
“Leave it to a playwright as subtle and perceptive as Conor McPherson to give us a play as troubling and mysterious as life itself.”
-The Washington Post
The History Boys
a comedy
by Alan Bennett
October 23-November 16, 2008
A hugely successful hit at London’s National Theatre, on Broadway (winner of 6 Tony Awards including Best Play), and on film, this brilliant comedy follows the senior year of eight history students in the north of England as they try to crack admission to Oxford and Cambridge. Unruly, bright, talented and amusing, these boys are in natural pursuit of sex, sport and acceptance to a good university. Their overeager Headmaster, a maverick teacher, and a new instructor whose mandate is to get the boys to think outside the box to get noticed guide the boys’ pursuits. Very funny and deeply moving, The History Boys explores the anarchy of adolescence, the nature of history, and the methods and aim of education. Directed by Alan Patrick Kenny.
“Nothing could diminish the incendiary achievement of this subtle, deep-wrought and immensely funny play about the value and meaning of education. In short, a superb, life-enhancing play.”
-The Guardian
“The History Boys is an unexpectedly moving mixture of intellectual verve and sexual angst.”
-The New York Sun
Striking 12
a new rock concert/holiday musical/a rewired version of The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Anderson
Book, Music and Lyrics by Brendan Millburn, Rachel Sheinkin, and Valerie Vigoda
December 11-31, 2008
‘Tis the season. Deal with it. NSC is proud to bring back its 2007 hip holiday hit Striking 12, the refreshingly alternative holiday rock musical that describes itself as “a holiday show for people who don’t like holiday shows.” With an innovative team of creators that include Tony Award-winner Rachel Sheinkin (The 25th…Spelling Bee) and the celebrated pop-rock band GrooveLily, Striking 12 is a unique hybrid of musical theatre and live concert. It tells the story of a grumpy, overworked New Yorker who resolves to spend New Year’s Eve alone in his apartment when an unexpected visitor brings some much-needed cheer. The evening springs to life through an eclectic GrooveLily score that combines pop, rock, jazz, showtunes and more with a healthy dose of 21st-century skepticism and old-fashioned-uplift. Alan Patrick Kenny leads a cast of actor-musicians in NSC’s production of this sell-out Off-Broadway hit.
“I suspect Striking 12 might be a show people will want to see more than once – it’s simultaneously a good concert and an engaging piece of theatre. What’s more, it’s something different for the holidays. Guys who say they don’t like theatre can take their dates to this one, and everyone will have a good time.”
-CityBeat
“Thoroughly winning! More artfully crafted and engaging than virtually all the standard-mold musicals these days. Alive with wit and humor.”
-The New York Times
Dying City
a drama
by Christopher Shinn
January 8-25, 2008
NSC is proud to produce acclaimed playwright Christopher Shinn for the first time in Cincinnati with his stunning new play Dying City, which recently received raves at London’s Royal Court Theatre and Lincoln Center in New York. When an Iraq war widow is unexpectedly visited by her dead husband’s twin brother, the two are forced to explore the repercussions of their loss, confront the secrets of the past, and admit the truth about the tragic legacy that connects them.
“Anyone who doubts that Mr. Shinn is among the most provocative and probing of American playwrights today need only experience the creepy, sophisticated welding of form and content that is Dying City. Unlike so many contemporary plays Dying City raises obvious, important issues in anything but obvious ways.”
-The New York Times
"The finest new American play I’ve seen in a long while. Dying City is a political play and also a psychodrama about what Arthur Miller called the politics of the soul. It’s about public conscience and private grief, and real and symbolic catastrophes.”
-New York Observer
Dead City
a modern riff on James Joyce’s Ulysses
by Sheila Callaghan
February 5-22, 2009
Samantha Blossom wakes up one June morning in her Upper East Side apartment to find her life being narrated over the airwaves of public radio. She discovers in the mail an envelope addressed to her husband from his lover, which spins her raw and untethered into an odyssey through the city – a day full of chance encounters, coincidences, a quick love affair, and a fixation on a mysterious but damaged poet genius Jewel. This 90-minute multimedia comic drama by bad-girl playwright Sheila Callaghan is a modernized, gender-reversed, relocated, hyper-theatrical riff on the novel Ulysses, occurring exactly 100 years to the day after Joyce’s jaunt through Dublin, directed by Alan Patrick Kenny.
“Dead City is a stylish, lyrical, fascinating, occasionally irritating, and eminently worthwhile – the kind of work that is thoroughly invigorating.”
-Backstage
“Wonderful…Sheila Callaghan’s pleasingly witty and theatrical new drama that is a love letter to New York masquerading as hate mail. Callaghan writes with a world-weary tone and has a poet’s gift for economical description. The entire dead city comes alive.”
-The New York Times
Bent
a drama
by Martin Sherman
March 12-April 5, 2009
NSC is honored to present Cincinnati’s first professional production of Martin Sherman’s landmark 1979 drama, Bent. This provocative story follows one man’s journey from the hedonistic cabarets and clubs of 1930’s Berlin to the inhuman excess of an oppressive regime. When Max falls in love with a fellow prisoner he discovers the true meaning of love and self-acceptance against impossible odds. Bent has touched a universal nerve in over 50 countries and over 21 languages, addressing current issues of identity and humanity in the world we live in with passion and humor. Directed by Alan Patrick Kenny.
“A shattering play of intense action, written in the language of the holocaust. One of the most important political and cultural events of the last few years.”
-Christopher St. Magazine
“Martin Sherman’s Bent is relevant to events and facts today of life throughout the world where gay people are often put at a disadvantage by the laws of whatever country they happen to live in. Although things are improving, I think it’s because of this story that Martin Sherman has told so strongly presenting the case for human understanding and what it is to be gay.”
-original Bent star Sir Ian McKellen
A Little Night Music
a musical
Book by Hugh Wheeler, Music and Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim
April 23-May 17, 2009
One of Broadway’s most neglected masterpieces, the romantic and achingly beautiful A Little Night Music deals with the universal subject of love, in all its wondrous, humorous and ironic permutations. It’s also disarmingly warm, funny, charming, and very human. NSC is proud to return to the canon of Stephen Sondheim with a new look at what happens to romance when the sun sits low. NSC welcomes guest director Joe Deer, chair of the Musical Theatre department at Wright State University to the helm, as well as guest stars Bruce Cromer (A Christmas Carol, King Lear) and Amy Warner (The Goat, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?).
“Heady, civilized, sophisticated, and enchanting.”
-The New York Times
“A jeweled music box of a show; lovely to look at, delightful to listen to.”
-Time Magazine
City of Angels
a jazz musical
Book by Larry Gelbart, Music by Cy Coleman, Lyrics by David Zippel
July 16-August 16, 2009
NSC concludes its season with the quintessential Hollywood musical, City of Angels. This modern masterpiece features top-shelf muscular jazz music by the great Cy Coleman, a complex book jam-packed with laughs by legend Larry Gelbart, and razor sharp lyrics by David Zippel. The show is two shows in one with the story of writer adapting a noir novel into a screenplay in the colorful, manipulative Hollywood of the ‘40s, and interweaving the black and white enactment of that smoky 20’s whodunit screenplay. Due to its intense set, technical, and musical demands, City of Angels is rarely produced. NSC Artistic Director is proud to unveil a radical reconception of the show, setting it on a movie soundstage, with new arrangements including a vocal-orchestral component by NSC vet Steven Milloy, as well as film and multimedia elements.
“One of the most innovative, brilliant, perfect, breathtaking, entertaining pieces of theatre I have ever seen. The lyrics by David Zippel are bright and diamond hard.”
-New York Daily News
“There’s a miracle on Broadway, an American musical, with American wisecracks and an original American script. It’s smart, swinging, sexy and funny. Wit is all over the stage.”
-Newsweek
