Complete Cast and Creative Team Set for THE MANHATTAN VARIATIONS at Little Island

Little Island will present the musical memoir The Manhattan Variations created by Chris Thile and Claire Coffee this week from Wednesday, August 14 through Sunday, August 18 in Little Island’s 700-seat Amph, with an official opening night on Thursday, August 15.
 
Created by Chris Thile and Claire Coffee and performed by Thile, The Manhattan Variations is a musical memoir that revolves around the legendary Lower East Side cocktail bar Milk & Honey. With a tapestry of music and stories, Thile recalls his younger self – a hungry artist, fresh to New York– searching for a drink and finding instead something more like home behind Milk & Honey’s velvet curtain. Throughout the original score by Thile, his quintessentially intricate mandolin work recalls the delicacy and precision with which a great cocktail is made.  
 
The production’s creative team includes Krit Robinson (scenic design) Mary Ellen Stebbins (lighting design), Shannon Slaton (sound design), and Betsy Ayer (production stage manager).
  
Running simultaneously at Little Island’s 200-seat The Glade is Language City, a multimedia performance about the past, present, and future of the world’s most linguistically diverse city, featuring speakers of endangered, Indigenous, and minority languages. With text based on the linguist Ross Perlin's book of the same name, the performance is a collaboration between Perlin and Daniel Kaufman’s Endangered Language Alliance, Michael Leibenluft, Gung Ho Projects and directed by Leibenluft. The performance features Tenzin Donsel, Julia Gu, Kewulay Kamara, Malcolm Opoku, Shubhra Prakash, Irwin Sánchez, and Dmitris Stefanidis.
 
The production’s creative team includes Karen Boyer (costume design), Megumi Katayama (sound design), Cinthia Chen (video design), and Josh Bloom (production stage manager)
 
Little Island recently announced that an annual, four-month-long summer season of world premieres, which kicked off on June 1, will feature a total of nine newly commissioned pieces. Little Island’s new arts program moves towards the future with a commitment to a multi-year roster of original work, all commissioned by and developed at Little Island. Bookended by the premiere of choreographer Twyla Tharp’s newest work How Long Blues and a 90-minute remix of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in which outré opera diva Anthony Roth Costanzo sings every leading role, the season will offer premieres of varying scales across all areas of performance – including music, dance, theater, opera, comedy, jazz, pop, and funk, all outdoors and directly sited on the Hudson River at 14th Street in New York City. The Amph, the park’s 700-seat amphitheater, will house larger scale performances at a $25 ticket price, while The Glade, the park’s 200-seat venue, will be home to more intimate works, all of which will be completely free to the public.
 
Tickets to Little Island's summer season of performances are available for purchase on littleislandtickets.com, TodayTix.com, or by downloading the TodayTix app.