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Tickets On Sale Now for The Public's 2014-15 Season, Featuring Works by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Bridget Everett & More

By: Jul. 29, 2014
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Single tickets are on sale now for The Public Theater's 2014-15 season that will include three world premiere musicals, a free Public Works musical adaptation of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, new plays by Suzan-Lori Parks, Young Jean Lee, and Lemon Andersen, Bridget Everett's new show at Joe's Pub, the 11th edition of the acclaimed Under the Radar Festival, the continuation of the Mobile Shakespeare Unit, the fifth season of Public Forum, New Work Now!, the Emerging Writers Group Spotlight Series and $20 tickets to Public Lab, now in its eighth year. Single tickets are available by calling (212) 967-7555, at www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at The Public Theater at Astor Place at 425 Lafayette Street.

The Public Theater's season will begin in September with the return of Public Works, featuring over 200 actors and community members in a free original musical adaptation of Shakespeare's THE WINTER'S TALE. Public Works Director Lear deBessonet will once again direct an unforgettable community event that will include music and lyrics by Todd Almond and run for three nights only, September 5-7, at the Delacorte Theater.

Tickets to Public Works' THE WINTER'S TALE are free, continuing The Public Theater's long-standing tradition of free programming and community engagement. They will be distributed, two per person, at 12:00 p.m. on the day of the show at the Delacorte Theater. Since the opening of the Delacorte in 1962, more than five million people have enjoyed more than 150 free productions of Shakespeare and other classical works and musicals. Free tickets will be available via the Virtual Ticketing lottery at www.publictheater.org on the day of the performance. You may become a Summer Supporter for a $75 tax-deductible donation and receive a reserved seat to the event. For information and to donate, call 212-967-7555.

September will also feature ROCK BOTTOM, created by Bridget Everett, Marc Shaiman, Scott Wittman, Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, and Matt Ray, at Joe's Pub at The Public. Originally commissioned as part of the Joe's Pub 2013 New York Voices series, ROCK BOTTOM is a shockingly funny and moving new show that will begin performances on Tuesday, September 9 and run through Saturday, October 11 at Joe's Pub, with an official press opening on Wednesday, September 17. Joe's Pub at The Public serves food nightly, but there is no food or drink minimum for this show.

Written by the ferociously talented Bridget Everett with Tony Award-winning songwriting duo Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, Adam "Ad-Rock" Horovitz, and Matt Ray, ROCK BOTTOM is the entertainer's first major production since her 2007 musical At Least It's Pink. It's the story of what happens when you're too passionate to give up, and too big to fail. In it, Everett barrels through life tip-toeing toward disaster, wine bottle by wine bottle and man by man. However, instead of succumbing to a chardonnay-induced stupor, Everett embraces a series of revelations that lead her and her voice of an angel to redemption. It features new original songs written with Shaiman, Wittman, Ray and Horovitz, as well as familiar favorites heard in Everett's monthly sold-out showcase with her band, The Tender Moments at Joe's Pub.

Following the success of the recent musicals Fun Home, Giant, and Here Lies Love, The Public will present three world premiere musicals beginning in the fall with THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE. Conceived and directed by Daniel Aukin, THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE begins performances on Tuesday, September 30 and runs through Sunday, November 2, with an official press opening on Wednesday, October 22.

Based on the nationally best-selling novel of the same name by 2005 MacArthur Fellow Jonathan Lethem, this soaring new musical THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE will open in October with a dynamite creative team including composer/lyricist Michael Friedman (Love's Labour's Lost, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson) and bookwriter Itamar Moses. THE FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE is the extraordinary coming-of-age story about 1970s Brooklyn and beyond - of black and white, soul and rap, block parties and blackouts, friendship and betrayal, comic books and 45s. And the story of what would happen if two teenagers obsessed with superheroes believed that maybe, just maybe, they could fly. Co-production with Dallas Theater Center.

The 2014-15 season will also feature Master Writer Chair Suzan-Lori Parks' new play FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS (PARTS 1, 2, & 3). Directed by Jo Bonney, the show begins performances on Tuesday, October 14 and runs through Sunday, November 16, with an official press opening on Tuesday, October 28.

Pulitzer Prize winner Suzan-Lori Parks (Topdog/Underdog, The Book of Grace) continues her longstanding relationship with The Public Theater with FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS (PARTS 1, 2, & 3), a devastatingly beautiful, dramatic work set over the course of the Civil War. Jo Bonney directs this moving and haunting drama comprised of three plays presented in a single performance. In Part 1, "A Measure of Man," Hero, a slave who is accustomed to his master's lies, must now decide whether to join him on the Confederate battlefield in exchange for a promise of freedom. Part 2, "The Battle in the Wilderness" follows Hero and the Colonel as they lead a captured Union solider toward the Confederate lines as the cannons approach. Finally, in Part 3, "The Union of My Confederate Parts," the loved ones Hero left behind question whether to escape or wait for his return - only to discover that for Hero, freedom may have come at a great spiritual cost. A masterful new work from one of our most lyrical and powerful writers, FATHER COMES HOME FROM THE WARS is a deeply personal epic about love and hope in a world of impossible choices. Presented in association with American Repertory Theater.

STRAIGHT WHITE MEN, written and directed by Young Jean Lee, will have its New York premiere in November with Austin Pendleton, Scott Shepherd, Pete Simpson, and James Stanley in the cast. It begins performances on Friday, November 7 and runs through Sunday, December 7, with an official press opening on Monday, November 17.

The New York Times has named Obie Award winner Young Jean Lee (The Public's Church and We're Gonna Die) "the most adventurous downtown playwright of her generation." Her new play STRAIGHT WHITE MEN defies expectations with a conventionally structured take on the classic American father-son drama. When Ed and his three adult sons come together to celebrate Christmas, they enjoy cheerful trash-talking, pranks, and takeout Chinese. Then they confront a problem that even being a happy family can't solve: when identity is the cornerstone of one's worth, and privilege is increasingly problematic, what is the value of being a straight white man? STRAIGHT WHITE MEN is a production by Young Jean Lee's Theater Company and is commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, Center Theatre Group (Los Angeles), Steirischer Herbst Festival (Graz), Les Spectacles Vivants - Centre Pompidou (Paris), Festival d'Automne à Paris, and The Public Theater (New York).

The world premiere musical HAMILTON, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda, inspired by the book "Alexander Hamilton" by Ron Chernow, and directed by Thomas Kail, begins performances on Tuesday, January 20 and runs through Sunday, February 22, with an official press opening on Tuesday, February 17.

From the creative team behind the Tony Award-winning In The Heights comes a wildly inventive new musical about the scrappy young immigrant who forever changed America: Alexander Hamilton. Tony and Grammy Award winner Lin-Manuel Miranda wields his pen and takes the stage as the unlikely founding father determined to make his mark on a new nation as hungry and ambitious as he. From bastard orphan to Washington's right hand man, rebel to war hero, loving husband caught in the country's first sex scandal to Treasury head who made an untrusting world believe in the American economy, HAMILTON is an exploration of a political mastermind racing against time. Its score is a musical melting pot mixing soul, rap, jazz, and traditional Tin Pan Alley. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Eliza Hamilton, and lifelong Hamilton friend and foe, Aaron Burr, all make their mark in this story of the men and women who sparked a revolution and built a new nation. Tony Award nominee Thomas Kail directs this new musical about taking your shot, speaking your mind, and turning the world upside down.

Stew and Heidi Rodewald, creators of the Tony Award-winning show Passing Strange, team with director Joanna Settle to bring their thrilling new musical, THE TOTAL BENT, to The Public next spring. THE TOTAL BENT begins performance on Tuesday, March 3 and runs through Sunday, April 5, with an official press opening on Thursday, March 19.

A riotous new show at the crossroads of the sacred and profane, survival and liberation, gospel and rock 'n' roll. When a British record producer arrives in Montgomery, Alabama to hook Marty Roy, a young black musical prodigy rebelling from the constraints of the world around him, he launches us back into Marty's tumultuous musical upbringing. The son of a gospel star and self-proclaimed healer, Marty spent his childhood writing the songs that have made his charismatic father famous. But in an America on the verge of social upheaval, Marty finds himself at odds with his complicated and spiritually forceful father, desperate to make his own way and his own sound. A funny, fiery, one-of-a-kind show, THE TOTAL BENT is about the passions that divide a father and son as they make their music and make their choice between salvation and selling out.

Lemon Andersen's first full-length play, TOAST will have its world premiere as part of Public Lab. TOAST begins performances on Friday, April 3 and runs through Sunday, April 19, with an official press opening on Monday, April 13. All tickets for Public Lab shows are only $20.

TOAST is an electrifying new play by acclaimed spoken word artist and Tony Award-winning writer Lemon Andersen (The Public's County of Kings: The Beautiful Struggle, HBO's "Def Poetry"), directed by Andersen's County of Kings collaborator Elise Thoron. A Public Theater commission first presented at The Public's Under the Radar Festival, TOAST ingeniously weaves major characters from black oral narratives into a gripping story about a group of inmates fighting to keep their minds free amidst the 1971 riots that rocked Attica Prison.

After 27 years served for murder in Attica's D-Block, Willie Green, aka Dolomite, has become an unlikely father figure to his cellmates, folklore heroes like Jesse James, Hobo Ben, Annabelle Jones, Stackolee and Hard Rock. Though word is brewing throughout Attica that a riot is coming, Dolomite would rather not get involved. But when one of the youngest inmates in their block is viciously beaten by guards for protesting prison conditions, Dolomite has to decide whether to join the riots or lock himself in his cell and hope for a promised parole date and the chance to taste freedom. Honoring the spoken word narratives recited in pool halls, bars and prisons across America by generations of black poets, this stunning new play is about men trying to live free in a system-and a world-designed to keep them chained. TOAST was developed, in part, at the Sundance Institute Theatre Program. Funding for the development of TOAST is provided by Time Warner Inc., and the MAP Fund, a program of Creative Capital supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Single tickets for The Public Theater's 2014-15 Season are on sale now by calling (212) 967-7555, www.publictheater.org, or in person at the Taub Box Office at The Public Theater at Astor Place at 425 Lafayette Street. The Library at The Public will also be open nightly for food and drink, beginning at 5:30 p.m., and Joe's Pub will continue to offer some of the best music in the city.

Photo Credit: Walter McBride / WM Photos







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