John Malkovich to Lead THE GIACOMO VARIATIONS at NY City Center in May

New York City Center's 2012-13 season will open on September 27 with the ninth annual Fall for Dance Festival, featuring 20 acclaimed international and U.S. dance companies and choreographers in five programs for only $15 a ticket. City Center will celebrate the 20th season of its acclaimed Tony Award-winning Encores! series on November 12 with a Gala benefit starring Raúl Esparza and Kelli O'Hara. The Encores! Anniversary Season will open on January 30, 2013, with Fiorello!, the show that launched the series in 1994, and will continue with It's a Bird...It's a Plane...It's Superman, followed by On Your Toes.

Last season's acclaimed production of Duke Ellington's Cotton Club Parade will return for a limited, seven-performance run, November 14–18. Cotton Club Parade, conceived by Jack Viertel, will once again be directed and choreographed by WarrenCarlyle, with music direction by Jazz at Lincoln Center Artistic Director Wynton Marsalis. The show will feature the Jazz at Lincoln Center All Stars under the direction of Daryl Waters.

For the first time since 1996, Pacific Northwest Ballet's full company returns to New York and City Center for two programs, under the direction of Artistic Director Peter Boal: a mixed rep of Balanchine ballets and Jean-Christophe Maillot's full-length Roméo et Juliette. The dance season also features world premieres and new productions by American Ballet Theatre and New York City Center Principal Dance Company Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, including a new work commissioned by New York City Center.

New York City Opera returns to City Center, its first home, for the first time since 1965 with brand-new productions of Gioachino Rossini's Moses in Egypt, followed by Jacques Offenbach's La Périchole.

Theater Productions on City Center's stages include the American premiere of The Giacomo Variations, starring John Malkovich as the legendary lover Giacomo Casanova. Manhattan Theatre Club's season includes the world premiere of Terrence McNally's Golden Age, directed by Walter Bobbie, and Liz Flahive's The Madrid, directed by Leigh Silverman and starring Edie Falco. MTC will also return to Stage II with The Studio at Stage II - The Harold and Mimi Steinberg New Play Series. Also on Stage II, The Women's Project will present three productions including a world premiere by Laura Marks and a North American Premiere by Elfriede Jelinek, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Literature.

New YorK Gilbert & Sullivan Players returns to City Center for G&S Fest 2013, featuring three iconic classic productions: The Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Yeomen of the Guard.

THE GIACOMO VARIATIONS, May 31 – June 2, 2013 Tickets on Sale September 4

Writer, poet, gambler, military man, prison escapee, friend of princes, popes and cardinals, and above all, lover, from 1725 to 1798, the Venetian author and adventurer Giacomo Casanova has surely lived one of the most extraordinary lives of all time. But what worth has a rich and colorful life, when you are soon to die? John Malkovich portrays the master scoundrel and seducer during his twilight years in The Giacomo Variations, making its New York debut fresh from the world premiere in Vienna.

Under the direction of Austrian Michael Sturminger, Malkovich and co-star Ingeborga Dapkünaité perform scenes from Casanova's 1790 memoir, Histoire de ma vie. As Casanova reminisces about one of his close friends,

Mozart's librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte, we hear excerpts from some of Mozart's best-known operas – Cosi Fan Tutte, Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro – performed live by a Wiener Academy Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Martin Haselböck.