The 2010 season at Powerhouse Theater, a unique collaboration between Vassar College and New York Stage and Film, is shaping up to provide several potential Broadway offerings in the future, with such heavyweights as Michael Mayer, Sheryl Kaller, and John Patrick Shanley developing work alongside exciting newcomers that include BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON collabortator Alex Timbers and Justine Levine.
The season - beginning June 25 through August 1, 2010 - will offer 20 new works in total, featuring premieres by Tracy Thorne, Eve Ensler, Richard Nelson & Peter Golub, Steven Sater & Duncan Sheik, Patricia Wettig, and Jennifer Westfeldt and more.
The Powerhouse Theater Mainstage performances present fully staged and designed works-in-progress each season.
The first work on the mainstage is an exquisite new play WE ARE HERE (June 29 - July 11) by actor and playwright Tracy Thorne, directed by Tony nominee Sheryl Kaller (Next Fall). Thorne's play offers a glimpse at three generations of a family, who possess wit, endurance, and compassion in the face of unimaginable loss - and they all sing.
Offering his 14th debut work at Powerhouse is Oscar, Pulitzer, and Tony Award-winning playwright and director John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Doubt), whose PIRATE (July 21 - August 1) will be the second offering on the mainstage. PIRATE is a funny, provocative, and wildly theatrical tale of a guy who keeps showing up. Shanley's protagonist appears a lot like Adolph Hitler, but Hitler is gone and Pirate is still with us.
The Martel Musicals, concert readings of works-in-progress, are offered each season in the acoustically superb, intimate 325-seat Martel Theater of the Vogelstein Center for Drama and Film, designed by Cesar Pelli.
This season a dynamic team from the "most perceptive political theater of the season" (New York Times' review of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) will offer the scrappy, hilarious, and though-provoking new musical BONFIRE NIGHT (July 16 - 18). With book, music, and lyrics by Justin Levine (music director, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and directed by Alex Timbers (writer and director, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) BONFIRE NIGHT will bring history alive through an eclectic blend of jazz, pop, rock, and gospel as a band of English Catholics revolt against the tyrannical King James. This musical was inspired by the true events of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and the legendary radical Guy Fawkes.
