Performances Begin This Sunday for Red Bull Theater's THE ALCHEMIST

RED BULL THEATER will begin performances Sunday for the World Premiere of a brand new adaptation of Ben Jonson's classic comedy, The Alchemist, adapted by Jeffrey Hatcher and directed by Jesse Berger, the team that created the hit comedy The Government Inspector.

Featured in the cast are Nathan Christopher (Red Bull debut); Stephen DeRosa (Red Bull: The Government Inspector; Broadway: Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus, The Nance, Into the Woods, The Man Who Came to Dinner); Carson Elrod (Bway: Peter and The Starcatcher, Reckless, Noises Off; Off-Bway: The Tempest, Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well - NYSF; The Liar, The Heir Apparent - CSC); Manoel Felciano (Red Bull: The Changeling; Bway: To Kill a Mockingbird, Amélie, Sweeney Todd - Tony nomination); Teresa Avia Lim (Bway: Junk - Lincoln Center Theater; Off-Bway: Caesar and Cleopatra - GTG, The Taming of the Shrew - Public Theater); Jacob Ming-Trent (Falstaff in Shakespeare in the Park's Merry Wives, Lortel Award winner - Father Comes Home From the Wars..., Panda in HBO's "Watchmen"); Louis Mustillo ("Mike & Molly," Bartenders - OCC nomination Best Solo Performance); Reg Rogers (Bway: Tootsie, The Royal Family - OCC nominations; The Iceman Cometh, Present Laughter, The Big Knife and Holiday - Tony and Drama Desk nominations. The Dazzle - OBIE and Lucille Lortel Awards); Jennifer Sánchez (Bway: Pretty Woman, On Your Feet, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown); and Allen Tedder (Bway: To Kill a Mockingbird, King Lear - Shakespeare in the Park).

The creative team includes Alexis Distler (scenic design), Tilly Grimes (costumes), Cha See (lighting), Greg Pliska (sound), Deborah Hecht (dialect and voice), and Rick Sordelet (action movement). Scholar Tanya Pollard will serve as dramaturg.

Performances begin Sunday November 7th, at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street) for a limited Off-Broadway engagement through December 19th only. Opening Night is set for Sunday November 21st. To purchase tickets visit Telecharge.com, call (212) 239-6200, or visit the New World Stages box office (daily, after 1pm).

"Live theater! In person! Finally! And a COMEDY! Hooray! I couldn't be more excited to get back to doing what we do best -- sharing classic stories with audiences, featuring some of the finest actors in the country. In the case of The Alchemist, it is a thrill to be diving back into rehearsals with one of the greatest comedies ever written. A forerunner to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and the like, this delectable confection of con artists and buffoons on the make is in love with (and makes hilarious fun of) the foibles of all people-especially with the alchemical trickery of actors and the magic of theater itself. In Jeffrey Hatcher's fantastic (and even more farcical) new version, it comes to contemporary life sans scholastic dust, plus an extra comic twist... Or twelve. Who could have foretold the timeliness of this comedy? A play that takes place at the end of a plague? Neither Jeffrey Hatcher nor I can claim that kind of prescience, when we first planned this adaptation in 2018. However, it does give me a sense of joy and hope that we are returning to live theater with a play that points us (in a fun way) to a return to a more normal life in 2022 with fewer masks, fewer worries about our plague, and more LAUGHS." said Berger, smiling through his Delta double mask.

"As we return to in-person performance, the health and safety of everyone involved is of paramount importance to all of us. We're thrilled that our first production during these extraordinary times will be held at New World Stages, owned and operated by The Shubert Organization. As it has worked to reopen their Broadway venues, The Shubert Organization has proven to be committed to the health and safety of all theatre employees, production staff, cast, and audience members. This is a commitment that Red Bull Theater shares. Masks, proof of vaccination, and a photo ID will be required for all guests. We invite our audiences, new and old, to come back and laugh with us, safely and with confidence," said Managing Director Jim Bredeson.

"Samuel Coleridge wrote that Ben Jonson's The Alchemist was one of the 'three most perfect plots ever planned' (the other two perfect plots were Oedipus and Tom Jones, both of which I plan to screw up next), so when Jesse Berger asked me to adapt the play for Red Bull, I took Coleridge's comment as a warning: 'Don't screw up the plot.' Jonson's comedy is an exquisitely wound mechanism and a joy to watch unwind, but his language can be daunting. He's funniest to those who know what Jonson knew, and there's nothing worse than a joke that requires a footnote to explain why it's funny. Purists will call what I've written a free adaptation, and much of it anachronistic, but it's intended to be in Jonson's style and spirit, if not his meter. Of course, I did screw around with the plot. Ours is a slimmed down version of the play, with fewer characters and one setting instead of four. In making it more compact, I couldn't help but change Jonson's perfect plan. To those in the know, this will be evident in the role of Dol Common. Dol has more to do than she did in the original. Jonson's Dol is a great character, but Jesse and I thought she got tossed about a bit, so she's been given more brass. Ditto Dame Pliant. Dol and Dame Pliant are the only females in the play. Two women against eight men. We've tried to make it a fair fight. So, apart from dumbing down the highbrow jokes, ruining the perfect plot, tossing in anachronisms, and adding a song very much like one sung by Shirley Bassey in 1964, the play is pretty much your grandmother's The Alchemist. If your grandmother was Shirley Bassey," said Jeffrey Hatcher.

Ben Jonson's Jacobean jack-in-the-box of a play is a side-splitting, screwball farce of magical proportions. London. 1606. It's plague time again. When a wealthy gentleman flees to the country, his trusted servant opens his house to a pair of con artists and sets up a den of criminal capitalism. Claiming alchemical powers, the quick-witted trio fleece an onslaught of greedy sheep with their virtuosic ability to improvise amidst increasingly frantic comings and goings. It's comic gold with dupes, double-dupes, duels, disguises, and a lucky flea named "Lewis."

For more information about The Alchemist, or any of Red Bull Theater's programs, visit www.redbulltheater.com.

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