Jerry Mitchell & More to Take Part in Barn on Fire Residency on Fire Island

This summer, New York Theatre Barn and the Fire Island Pines Arts Project will partner to create Barn on Fire, a new summer residency on Fire Island for three musical theatre writing teams and their original culture shifting musicals in development. Tony Award-winning director/choreographer Jerry Mitchell will serve as a mentor to the residency which includes the new musicals Sueños: Our American Musical, Buried, Little Miss Perfect, and How to You: A Musical Guide to Black Boyhood.

Centering the artist and their work, the week-long intensive retreat in Fire Island Pines is for writers and their creative teams to collaborate and further develop their show in a supportive, creative, and tranquil atmosphere. At the end of the week, the artists will have the opportunity to present what they have been working on before a live audience. While on the island, the Pines community will get a glimpse inside the blueprint of an original musical being developed in real time. Free and open to the public, the final presentation will be on Saturday, June 25th, 2022 at 6PM in Whyte Hall's Brandon Fradd Theater in Fire Island Pines.

Jesse J. Sanchez (Boston Lyric Opera's desert in, Music Supervisor/Oregon Shakespeare Festival) and Jeff Chambers' Sueños: Our American Musical is about three generations of a Mexican American family and their pursuit of the American dream. The show has been developed through each of New York Theatre Barn's core programs over the past two years. Most recently the show was on its feet for the first time in a week-long residency concluding with a virtual presentation of the work for a global audience called Inside the Incubation.

Buried, an untold story about love, AIDS and chosen family in the American South, is co-written by Michael Ferrara (Wicked, The Music Man) and director Joe Barros (Gigi, Cagney, Bastard Jones). Ruth Coker Burks cared for hundreds of queer men whose families abandoned them during the beginning of the AIDS epidemic. Burks went on to bury the ashes of these men in her family's Arkansas cemetery over The Remains of her conservative Methodist relatives. Buried excavates an untold chapter of the AIDS crisis and a muted time in queer history.

A coming of age and coming out story, Little Miss Perfect is written by Joriah Kwamé (winner of the 2019 "Write Out Loud" Song Competition) with dramaturgy by Teresa Attridge. Noelle's world turns upside down when she develops feelings for Malaya, the foreign exchange student that her conservative family is hosting. As class president, she must also confront her privilege and compliance when her high school refuses to take steps in being more inclusive. The residency will also support Kwamé's How to You: A Musical Guide to Black Boyhood. Directed by Kimille Howard (Ain't Too Proud, Metropolitan Opera's Porgy and Bess), How to You is a musical fantasy about the unborn spirit of a black man who learns about the realities of identity, race, and humanity before entering the world.

The Barn on Fire residency is supported in part by the National Alliance for Musical Theatre's Frank Young Fund for New Musicals, The Robert Alfandre Foundation, Straighten Your Crown Productions, Henry Robin and Bob McGarity, Sully Bonolly and Robert Litmann, Vinnie Petrarca, John Krawchuk, Richard Winger, and Matthew Woolf. Tickets are available on FIPAP's website: www.fipap.org.

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