New Line Theatre, "the bad boy of musical theatre," has announced that for the first time in its history, New Line is selling season tickets, for its 27th season of adult, alternative musical theatre, including the St. Louis premiere of the four-woman rock opera LIZZIE, a very different take on the Lizzie Borden legend, running Sept. 28-Oct. 21, 2017; followed by Cole Porter's satiric masterpiece ANYTHING GOES, running March 1-24, 2018; and the St. Louis premiere of the world's first bio-historical musical comedy, YEAST NATION, written by the Urinetown team, running May 31-June 23, 2018. Tickets go on sale Aug. 1. All New Line's mainstage shows will be in the company's home, the Marcelle Theater, in Grand Center, St. Louis' arts district.
To order season tickets, go to
http://www.newlinetheatre.com/purchase/index.php
There are three kinds of subscriptions. The First Look Subscription contains tickets for only the Thursday preview for each show. These tickets cannot be exchanged for other dates. Each Regular Subscription includes one ticket voucher for each show in the season. You can use each voucher for any performance date during the run of that show. Each Flex Subscription includes three Flex Vouchers that you can use at any time for any show during the entire season -- use all three tickets for one show or spread them out over the season, however you want! The deadline for ordering season tickets is Sept. 1, 2017.
THE SEASON
LIZZIE
It's a sweltering August in 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. A prominent businessman and his wife are brutally axed to death in their home. Their daughter Lizzie Borden is the prime suspect. Lizzie's trial is a coast-to-coast media sensation, and her story becomes an American legend.
Lizzie is ferocious, powerful musical theatre as rock concert, four women and a six-piece rock band, chock full of rage, sex, betrayal, and bloody murder, an American mythology set to a blistering rock score, a radically new American musical with a sound owing less to Sondheim and
Andrew Lloyd Webber than to Bikini Kill, the Runaways, and Heart. The show has music by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer and
Alan Stevens Hewitt, lyrics by Cheslik-DeMeyer and Tim Maner, book and additional music by Maner, and additional lyrics by Hewitt.
The New York Times called the show "a gothic rock ritual with a 'riotgirl' attitude ... an eerie hybrid of rock club and a turn-of-the-century New England parlor. . . Presented with wall-rattling glee...deliciously watchable." The Village Voice talked about the show's "lush tunes which retch sex, rage, heat, misanthropy, and incest ... Surreal glee and gallows humor ... Finally, a rock musical you'd wanna mosh to." TimeOutNY called it "a fetching, brawny rock musical." And Show Business Weekly said, "We came for splattered red, for madness and mayhem, and Lizzie more than delivers."
The cast of New Line's Lizzie includes
Anna Skidis as Lizzie,
Kimi Short as Bridget,
Larissa White as Alice, and
Marcy Wiegert as Emma. The show will be directed by
Mike Dowdy-Windsor, with music direction by Sarah Nelson, scenic and lighting design by
Rob Lippert, costume design by
Sarah Porter, and sound design by Elli Castonguay.
Lizzie contains adult language and content.
ANYTHING GOES
New Line continues its 27th season with the rowdy, naughty, subversive masterpiece of musical comedy,
Cole Porter's Anything Goes, the stinging satire of Americans' quirky habit of turning religion into show business and criminals into celebrities, along the way skewering Wall Street, Prohibition, the Brits, and several other ripe targets.
First opening in a time when John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Al Capone, and evangelists Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Sunday were all national celebrities, this was potent, pointed satire; and it's just as potent today. The show's evangelist turned nightclub singer Reno Sweeney is equal parts McPherson and speakeasy hostess
Texas Guinan (the model for Velma Kelly in Chicago). And though we never meet gangster Snake Eyes Johnson, he's seems a fair double for Dillinger. But they all have their modern-day equivalents too.
Despite its reputation as old-school fluff, Anything Goes is a smart satire of American "cafe society" (the 1% of 1934), with the steamship S.S. American standing in for Shakespeare's woods, a place with no rules, where people find out who they really are and "correct" the mistakes they've made in the world of the City.
Artistic director
Scott Miller says, "It never occurred to me until I was writing my musical theatre history book (Strike Up the Band) that the two main themes of Anything Goes are as New Liney as they could be, the commercializing of religion into show business - isn't that what TV mega-churches are? - and the raising up of violent criminals into pop culture celebrities. Can we be sure that Reno Sweeney is any less authentic than Pat Robertson or Joel Osteen?"
New Line has chosen the 1962 version of the show (there are several versions), with a book by
Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse,
Howard Lindsay and
Russell Crouse, and additional songs from several other Porter musicals. The New Liners will return to the wildness and the high-energy subversion of the original production. Miller has been studying the show for some time, including the original 1934 script (which probably couldn't be produced today). Miller says, "Over time, the show has been worn down into a quaint, family-friendly piece of sketch comedy. I want to return it to its original, satiric, adult roots."
The cast of New Line Theatre's Anything Goes includes
Evan Fornachon (Billy Crocker),
Eileen Engel (Hope Harcourt),
Sarah Porter (Reno Sweeney),
Zachary Allen Farmer (Sir Evelyn Oakleigh),
Aaron Allen (Moonface Martin),
Sarah Dowling (Bonnie),
Jeffrey M. Wright (Mr. Whitney), Kimmie Kidd (Mrs. Harcourt), with Gabriel Beckerle,
Dominic Dowdy-Windsor,
Clayton Humburg,
Will Pendergast,
Michelle Sauer,
Larissa White,
Alyssa Wolf, and
Sara Rae Womack. The show will be directed by
Scott Miller and
Mike Dowdy-Windsor, with musical direction by
Nicolas Valdez, choreography by
Michelle Sauer and
Sara Rae Womack, scenic and lighting design by
Rob Lippert, costume design by
Sarah Porter, and sound design by Elli Castonguay.
YEAST NATION
The world's first bio-historical musical comedy, from the mad geniuses who brought us Urinetown!
It's the year 3,000,458,000 BC. The Earth's surface is a molten mass of
Volcanic Islands and undulating waves. The atmosphere is a choking fog lit by a dim red sun. And the mighty waters of the world are inhabited only by rocks, sand, salt, more rocks, a little silt, and the great society of salt-eating yeasts - yes, yeasts! - the worlds very first life form!
These single-cell salt-eaters are the only living creatures on earth, and they're up against a food shortage, a strange new emotion called Love, and the oppression of a tyrannical yeast king. But when the king's son ventures out of the known yeastiverse, the yeasts' story - and ours - is changed forever.
The New York Times, said, "This is the rare satire that knows exactly what it's doing and commits to it." Variety wrote, "Ostensibly, it's about the world's earliest life forms, but it's really a riff on individual human aspiration, love, and theatrical storytelling. While it's an easily recognizable sibling to Urinetown, this show possesses enough uniqueness and consistent cleverness to forge its own path."
With a book by
Greg Kotis, and music and lyrics by
Mark Hollmann and Kotis, Yeast Nation has been produced four times so far, at the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, in 2007; at the American Theater Company in Chicago in 2009; at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2011; and at the Ray of Light Theatre in San Francisco in 2014. The team has continued working on the show.
Artistic director
Scott Miller saw Urinetown in November 2001, right after it moved to Broadway. He says, "It blew my mind. From the very first song, I felt like someone had written a musical just for me." New Line produced Urinetown in 2007. Miller says, "As soon as I read the Yeast Nation script and heard the songs, I knew we had to work on this. It's going to be crazy amounts of fun."
The cast of New Line Theatre's Yeast Nation includes
Sarah Dowling (Jan-the-Unnamed),
Zachary Allen Farmer (Jan-the-Elder),
Larissa White (Jan-the-Sweet),
Dominic Dowdy-Windsor (Jan-the Second-Oldest),
Sarah Porter (Jan-the-Sly),
Michael Lowe (Jan-the-Wise),
Keith Thompson (Jan-the-Wretched), Jennelle Gilreath (Jan-the-Famished), Lex Ronan (The New One),
Colin Dowd (Jan-the-Youngest), Brittany Kohl Hester,
Clayton Humburg, Eleanor Humphrey, and Bradley Rohlf. The show will be directed by
Scott Miller and
Mike Dowdy-Windsor, with scenic and lighting design by
Rob Lippert, costume design by
Sarah Porter, and sound design by Elli Castonguay.
SINGLE TICKETS
Season tickets and single tickets for the 2017-2018 season go on sale August 1. All mainstage shows run Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, at 8:00 p.m., at the Marcelle Theater, 3310 Samuel Shepard Drive, just three blocks east of Grand, in Grand Center. (See our website for directions.) The first Thursday of each run is a preview.
For other information, visit New Line Theatre's full-service website at
www.newlinetheatre.com. All programs are subject to change.
ABOUT NEW LINE THEATRE
New Line Theatre is a professional company dedicated to involving the people of the St. Louis region in the exploration and creation of daring, provocative, socially and politically relevant works of musical theatre. New Line was created back in 1991 at the vanguard of a new wave of nonprofit musical theatre just starting to take hold across the country. New Line has given birth to several world premiere musicals over the years and has brought back to life several shows that were not well served by their original New York productions. Altogether, New Line has produced 81 musicals since 1991, and
the company has been given its own entry in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre and the annual Theater World. New Line receives funding from the Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.
New Line also continues its partnership with the Webster University Department of Music and their Bachelor of Music in Music Direction for Musical Theatre degree program.
New Line's current season closes with the world premiere of Out on Broadway: The Third Coming, running August 3-19. For more information, visit
www.newlinetheatre.com.
