New Musicals GODDESS and THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS Join The Public Theater's 2025 Season

The Public Theater has announced two additional new musicals that will be part of The Public’s Spring 2025 and Fall 2025 seasons at their landmark Astor Place home on 425 Lafayette Street. The new musicals include GODDESS and THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS.

This spring, after a successful world premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre, GODDESS will debut in New York. The production, conceived and directed by Associate Artistic Director/Resident Director Saheem Ali, features music and lyrics by Michael Thurber, a book by Tony Award nominee Jocelyn Bioh, and choreography by Darrell Grand Moultrie. Performances will begin in the Newman Theater on Tuesday, April 29, 2025, and will run through Sunday, June 1, with an official press opening on Tuesday, May 20. Joining the previously announced INITIATIVE by Else Went in the Fall 2025 season will be the world premiere of THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS, a new musical based on Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play The Skin of Our Teeth. The adaptation, music, and lyrics will be by Obie Award winner Ethan Lipton and the production will be directed by two-time Tony Award nominee Leigh Silverman. 

“It's thrilling to be able to announce not one, but two big, ambitious, joyous original musicals at The Public, led by artists central to The Public Theater family,” shares Artistic Director Oskar Eustis. “With GODDESS, Saheem, Michael, Jocelyn, and Darrell have perfectly set the myth of Marimba in a nightclub for the Gods, and Ethan Lipton's dry, smart, and hilarious musical wit is a perfect foil for Thornton Wilder's classic American voice in THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS, which will be directed by our own Leigh Silverman. The American theater continues to face challenges, but I'm so proud that we've been able to develop and produce these courageous and epic stories that are perfect for our time.”

The critically acclaimed team behind the 2021 Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Merry Wives returns to The Public with the New York premiere of a new musical conceived and directed by Associate Artistic Director/Resident Director Saheem Ali, featuring music and lyrics by Michael Thurber and a book by Tony Award nominee Jocelyn Bioh. A mysterious singer arrives at Moto Moto, a steamy Afro-jazz club in Mombasa, Kenya. She casts an entrancing spell on everyone, including a young man who has returned home from studying in America. Will the big plans for his life—stepping into a political legacy and marrying his fiancée—be upended? Inspired by the myth of Marimba, the Goddess who created beautiful songs from her heartbreak, this is a rousing tale of romance, the supernatural, and the quest towards one’s truest self.

“When I was in my late teens growing up in Kenya, I dreamt of one day creating an original musical inspired by a myth about the Goddess of music,” shares conceiver and director of GODDESS, Saheem Ali. “Years later, after immigrating to the United States, I gained the courage to pursue this vision. It’s been quite a journey! At the core of the story—about the intersection of the creative and the divine—is a reminder that one can only step into one’s power by accepting one’s truth. I’m grateful to my creative siblings Michael Thurber, Jocelyn Bioh, and Darrell Grand Moultrie, for sticking beside me through the years, as we now bring this beautiful story set in my home country to my artistic home, The Public Theater.”

Next fall, The Public’s Emerging Writers Group alumnus and Obie Award-winning playwright, songwriter, and singer Ethan Lipton brings his irreverently funny show THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS to The Public for its world premiere. A rollicking adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth, this new musical about age-old problems tells the twisting, often absurd story of the Antrobus family who have been alive for 5,000 years but live in the same existential dread as the rest of us. Mired in the hot mess of being alive, the Antrobuses survive all manner of catastrophe in their endless quest to begin again, and again, and again. Two-time Tony Award nominee Leigh Silverman directs this bracingly original spectacle—a musical reminder that surviving is what we do best.

“The Skin of Our Teeth is a beautiful play,” shares adapter Ethan Lipton about his inspiration for THE SEAT OF OUR PANTS. “A comedy about a family in a world of never-ending existential crises, Wilder’s script is prescient and heartbreaking and totally bonkers. I’m thrilled to have been given the chance to turn the show into a musical—at The Public, no less, and with the great Leigh Silverman—and I can’t wait to share it with our own totally screwed-up world.”

Tappan Wilder, spokesperson for the Wilder family, shares similar excitement about the collaboration. “The Skin of Our Teeth blew the roof off Broadway in 1942, hurling it through time and space. After a long search for a music-maker for Skin, the stars aligned and led us to Ethan Lipton. ‘Sensibility’ is a difficult word to define, but not where the crazy and timeless genius of the play, Lipton, and Silverman’s talents are concerned.” 

The Public’s 2024-2025 Season began with the North American premiere of COUNTING AND CRACKING, a Belvoir St Theatre and Kurinji co-production of the epic play written and associate directed by S. Shakthidharan and directed and associate written by Eamon Flack, which just completed its run at NYU Skirball. Currently running at The Public’s home on Astor Place is the New York premiere of GOOD BONES, a sharp, funny new work about gentrification and the growing price of the American dream written by Pulitzer Prize winner James Ijames and directed by The Public’s Associate Artistic Director/Resident Director Saheem Ali. Next, Australian playwright David Finnigan brings his play DEEP HISTORY, an urgent and personal retelling of how we’ve reached the brink of unthinkable climate disaster, to New York. Elevator Repair Service’s GATZ returns to The Public in November for final New York City encore of the acclaimed production, a thrilling enactment of The Great Gatsby. 

Tied to the upcoming 2024 Election, The Public will also present a series of programming entitled THE POLITICS OF NOW, which will include week-long presentations of THE FORD/HILL PROJECT (a Waterwell production co-presented by The Public and Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company) and GUAC, written and performed by Manuel Oliver. There will also be a one-night-only free screening of Theater on Podil’s production of Richard Nelson’s CONVERSATIONS IN TUSCULUM in Kyiv, Ukraine

With Ma-Yi Theater Company and La Jolla Playhouse, The Public kicks off 2025 with SUMO, a mesmerizing new drama set in the sacred world of Sumo wrestling by Lisa Sanaye Dring. The Astor Place season concludes with GLASS. KILL. WHAT IF IF ONLY. IMP., a quartet of inventive plays written by groundbreaking playwright Caryl Churchill and directed by James Macdonald. The Public will also produce a world premiere audio play of LET’S KEEP DANCING: A Death Row Story by John Purugganan about two souls fighting to survive death row.

Following a significant revitalization, The Delacorte Theater, home of Free Shakespeare in the Park, will reopen in Summer 2025 with a production of Shakespeare’s classic comedy TWELFTH NIGHT, also directed by The Public’s Associate Artistic Director/Resident Director, Tony Award nominee Saheem Ali, and featuring an all-star cast of Public Theater alumni, including Peter Dinklage, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Lupita Nyong’o, Sandra Oh, and more to be announced soon.  

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