Samantha Hill, Jayne Atkinson & Jonathan Hadary to Star in 'JULES VERNE' at BAM Fisher Next Month

Celebrating its 14th season, the Ensemble of the Romantic Century (ERC) returns to BAM Fisher for six performances of Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon. An original multi-media theatrical concert, with drama, film and music, Jules Verne dramatizes the face-to-face meeting between the French writer Jules Verne and the daring, young American journalist Nellie Bly. Written by Eve Wolf and directed by Donald T. Sanders, this fully-staged production seamlessly interweaves a script based on Verne's and Bly's own words performed by Tony nominee Jonathan Hadary (Jules Verne), Jayne Atkinson, currently on House of Cards (Honorine Verne), and Samatha Hill, currently Cosette in Les Miserables (Nellie Bly). The imaginative world of Jules Verne comes to life with the help of dazzling video design and projection incorporating clips from Le voyage dans la lune (George Méliès, 1902) along with live French chamber music performed by some of today's top chamber musicians as well as American music by Stephen Foster featuring live banjo and a barbershop quartet.

In Jules Verne: From the Earth to the Moon, ERC travels across space and time-to the moon and back-with the legendary Jules Verne and daring Nellie Bly, to tell the timeless story of two unlikely kindred spirits whose paths crossed briefly (in a media event that was) to the delight of the whole world and of each other. Bly, the enterprising 25 year-old American journalist, became an international celebrity when she embarked on a voyage around the world to beat the record of Phileas Fogg, the fictional hero of Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days. They said a woman couldn't do it, but Bly proved them wrong-even taking precious time out for a surprise detour in France to meet the aging Verne. Verne and Bly were linked by a common belief in the unbounded powers of human imagination and the possibilities of a completely visionary future.

"I love this story!" says Eve Wolf, Founder and Executive Artistic Director of ERC and writer/pianist of Jules Verne. "Jules Verne had an imagination that traveled to all the corners of the earth, under the sea, inside the earth and to the stars. And yet his own life was rather limited, provincial and solitary. When he met Nellie Bly, who was going around the entire world trying to beat the record of Verne's own fictional character, it was as if he were seeing the passing of a brilliant comet--- Verne was really taken by her! Even with the language barrier, they really connected. It was a rare and ephemeral moment - the seer into the future who is nearing the end of his life meets the future."

Known for connecting great music to the cultural events, politics and literature of earlier eras, ERC brings to life artistic luminaries from Van Gogh, Satie, Tolstoy and Dickinson to Sigmund Freud, Beethoven, Oscar Wilde and Fanny Mendelssohn. "We hope to take audiences on a historical journey in an intimate, dramatic setting, transforming their classical music concert experience."