New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab To Feature Three Original Musicals
Featured works will be Freedom Riders, The Ladies Man, and The Monkey King.
The 13th season of New York Theatre Barn’s Choreography Lab continues on Thursday, September 17, 2026, bringing three original musicals to life through the power of movement: Freedom Riders: The Civil Rights Musical, The Ladies Man, and The Monkey King: A Kung Fu Musical. The lab will be presented at 7:00PM ET at Open Jar Studios in NYC (1601 Broadway, 11th floor) and will be streamed live. Both the guest moderator and the choreographers will be announced shortly.
Curated by Avital Asuleen and funded in part by a generous gift from the Amber Foundation, the Lab brings writers and choreographers together to experiment, take creative risks, and discover how dance can unlock new possibilities for three original musicals. This season’s choreographers will dive into three vastly different theatrical landscapes, developing movement vocabularies that help define each show’s unique identity while allowing writers to see their characters, stories, and worlds in motion.
The evening will feature short excerpts from each of the three new musicals.
Freedom Riders: The Civil Rights Musical, written by Richard Allen and Taran Gray, follows a group of college-age activists who boarded interstate buses in 1961 to challenge segregation in the American South, risking their lives in a courageous fight against Jim Crow.
The Ladies Man, written by Justin Mortelliti and Shannon Hunt, is a new queer pop musical about coming out at the turn of the millennium, caught between the freedom to embrace who you are and the weight of strict Roman Catholicism.
The Monkey King: A Kung Fu Musical, written by Kimbirdlee Fadner and Jonathan Fadner, boldly reimagines the legendary Monkey King from Wu Cheng’en’s beloved 16th-century Chinese novel Journey to the West as a woman, combining classical and rock music with exhilarating kung fu choreography as she battles to save her tribe and achieve immortality.
Click here to purchase tickets. New York Theatre Barn will continue to provide Live CART captioning services, provided by Inclusive Communication Services. New York Theatre Barn’s programs are supported by A.R.T./New York’s NYC Small Theatres Fund made possible with support from the Howard Gilman Foundation. For more information, visit New York Theatre Barn’s website: www.nytheatrebarn.org.
