BLACK HOLE WEDDING Set for Planet Connections Festivity, Now thru 7/10

The Planet Connections Theatre Festivity presents Black Hole Wedding, a new musical fueled by shimmying electrons, with script and lyrics by Katherine Brann Fredricks and script and music by Paul Edward Nelson. Katherine Brann Fredricks directs a cast of eleven including Tommy Alsip*, Hadley Cronk*, Sean Hayden*, Ashanti J'Aria*, Anthony Michael Lopez*, David Marmanillo*, Meg McWhorter*, Rebecca Odorisio*, Aaron Riesebeck*, and Ravi Roth*. Four performances for Black Hole Wedding will be staged at the Paradise Factory, Upstairs Theatre, 64 E. 4th St., NYC from tonight, June 26-July 10 as part of The Planet Connections Theatre Festivity. The Festivity will take place June 15 - July 12 at the Paradise Factory in New York City.

Lying, stealing, forging, kidnapping, government-manipulating oil baron Dean captures and warehouses renewable energy discoveries. Alpha-geek Raymond fights back with a black hole trash compactor. Will Dean feed Raymond's fiancé to the black hole, in his campaign to promote capitalism by crushing competition? Will true love prevail in the face of ultimate greed, a chicken-bone fuel generator, and booth babes doing a strip tease where the black hole sucks their clothes off? Find out in the zany, musical satire Black Hole Wedding.

Today oil companies have more money than most countries. Corporate cheer-leaders in Congress say they'll believe global warming exists when they see the evidence, then they cut NASA's research budget to make sure no new evidence is found. Here's a little satire to remind us: we can all choose creativity over fossil fuels.

Black Hole Wedding has chosen to donate some of the proceeds from the production to NRDC. I hope you'll take a moment to take action at http://www.nrdc.org/action/ to protect imperiled wildlands and consider supporting them as well.

Black Hole Wedding is presented by the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity. Producer/Director/Script: Katherine Brann Fredrick's; Script & Composer: Paul Nelson; Musical Director: Julianne Merrill; Artistic Director: Shana McKay Burns; Lighting Designer: Andrew Schwaranth; Production Stage Manager & Props: David A. Vandervliet*; Graphics: Mary Williams; Publicist: Paul Siebold/Off Off PR.

Black Hole Wedding plays the following schedule as part of the Planet Connections Theatre Festivity: Friday June 26th at 7pm; Saturday June 27th at 8:45pm; Sunday July 5th at 12pm; Friday, July 10th at 4pm.

Tickets are $18 and can be purchased online at https://web.ovationtix.com/trs/cal/27385 or by calling 866-811-4111. Visit PlanetConnections.org for more information.

The runtime for Black Hole Wedding is approximately 2 Hours with no intermission.

Katherine Brann Fredricks (writer, director, producer) has written 7 musicals. Divine Chaos played regional theatres; Occasion for Sin received an Equity reading in New York; Walden, adapted from Thoreau, played the 2013 Planet Connections Festivity in New York City; and Angel of Hell's Kitchen, a low budget feature, is in preproduction. Katherine is President of Flagstaff Light Opera Company, where she directed Sound of Music. Katherine also wrote, produced & directed 2 feature documentaries: "The Price of the Pines" was a co-production with Canada's Banff Center for the Arts, and "The Yavapai Story," which aired on Cinemax, won a Bronze Apple at the National Educational Video & Film Festival, and was screened at New York's Museum of Modern Art.

Paul Edward Nelson (composer) is the chief architect for Search Technologies. Paul started writing the code for his first search engine in 1989. Ten years later "RetrievalWare" had grown to be a market leading search engine with $50m annual sales. Today, RetrievalWare is owned by Microsoft, and it is still in use by customers on all five continents. During his 20+ years in the search engine industry, Paul has been involved in hundreds of search engine implementations, of all shapes and sizes. Recently, Paul has been engaged with major US Government projects in support of the Obama administration's freedom of information initiative, and he has architected a range of open source-based search applications for large commercial customers. Paul is the Chief Architect at Search Technologies, an independent search implementation services company, where he provides architectural oversight for customer projects and conducts design, technology research and training. Paul's Music Awards include Frederick Loewe/ASCAP Musical Theater Scholarship (2005), Virginia Carty deLillo Composition Competition (2004-1st, 2002-2nd), Prix D'ete Composition Competition for Music and Technology (2004-3rd), Randolph S. Rothschild Award (2004), P. Bruce Blair Award (2003), Philip D. Glass Scholarship (2004), Peabody Merit Scholarship (4 years).

Planet Connections Theatre Festivity is New York's premiere socially-conscious theatre, music and film festival. The entire festival is aligned to help artist shine a light on the issues facing our society and support the organizations working to make a difference. The 2015 Theatre Festivity will run from June 15-July 12 at the Paradise Factory (located at 64 East 4th Street between the Bowery and 2nd Avenue), and will also play host to special events at various locations in New York City's East Village. The full lineup for the Festivity will be announced shortly. For more information on Planet Connections visit: planetconnections.org.