Photo Coverage: Transport Group Honors McNally & Mantello at 'Gimme A Break!' Benefit

Joe Mantello is best known for his work as a director on the Broadway productions of Wicked, Take Me Out (Tony Award), Assassins (Tony Award), Love! Valour! Compassion! (Tony nomination), and 9 to 5. He was a member of the original Broadway cast of Tony Kushner's Angels in America, for which he received a Tony Award nomination and a Drama Desk nomination for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play. In 2007 Mr. Mantello directed The Ritz, his sixth production with playwright Terrence McNally. Mr. Mantello is a member of Naked Angels and an associate artist at the Roundabout Theater Company. He is a recipient of Outer Critics Circle, Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel, Helen Hayes, Clarence Derwent, Obie and Joe A. Callaway awards.

Founded in 2001, Transport Group, under the leadership of Jack Cummings III, Artistic Director, and Lori Fineman, Executive Director, is a not-for-profit theatre company that develops and produces work by American Playwrights and composers with the aim of exploring the American consciousness in the 20th and 21st centuries. Transport Group presented its premiere production in 2002: Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which featured actors in their sixties in the roles of Emily and George and a twelve-year-old girl as the Stage Manager. Its second production, Requiem for William, an evening of seven seldom produced plays by William Inge, that featured a cast of 26 as well as original songs, premiered in 2003. In 2004 the company presented the first New York revival of Michael John LaChiusa's First Lady Suite, which received rave reviews, played to sold-out houses, and earned two Drama Desk Award nominations including outstanding revival of a musical. Recent productions include the world premiere of the musical The Audience, which featured a cast of 46 actors and earned three Drama Desk Award nominations, including outstanding musical; Normal, a new musical about a mother's battle to save her daughter from anorexia; cul-de-sac, a new play by Tony Award nominee John Cariani; the first New York revival of Tad Mosel's Pulitzer Prize play, All the Way Home; the 50th anniversary, Obie-winning production of William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, the world premiere musicals Crossing Brooklyn, Marcy in the Galaxy, and Being Audrey, and the first New York revival of Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead (which received a Drama Desk nomination). Both First Lady Suite and Bury the Dead were filmed for the New York Performing Arts Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive. Transport Group is the winner of a special 2007 Drama Desk Award for its "breadth of vision and its presentation of challenging productions."

Photo Credit: Amy Shaugnessy