Transport Group's SEE ROCK CITY & OTHER DESTINATIONS Receives Cast Recording, Featuring Donna Lynne Champlin, Jonathan Hammond and More

Transport Group Theatre Company, the winner of both a Special Drama Desk Award and Obie Award, has announced that that their award-winning 2010 production of See Rock City & Other Destinations will receive an original cast recording produced by Yellow Sound Label. The Drama Desk and Richard Rodgers Award-winning musical has music by Brad Alexander and book and lyrics by Adam Mathias. The show was directed by Transport Group Artistic Director Jack Cummings III.

See Rock City & Other Destinations ran July 17 through August 14, 2010 at The Duke on 42nd Street. In 2011, the show was nominated for six Drama Desk Awards including Outstanding Musical, Outstanding Music, Outstanding Lyrics, Outstanding Book of a Musical, Outstanding Director of a Musical, and Outstanding Lighting Design. Librettist Adam Mathias won the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical. Publishing and licensing for See Rock City & Other Destinations are handled by Samuel French, Inc. For complete information: www.seerockcitymusical.com.

Winner of the 2008 Richard Rodgers Award for Staged Reading, administered by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the BMI Foundation's 2007 Jerry Bock Award, See Rock City & Other Destinations is a contemporary pop-rock musical about everyday travelers at tourist destinations across America. A wanderer believes his destiny is written on rooftops along the North Carolina Interstate. A young man yearns to connect with intelligent life in Roswell, New Mexico. A woman at the Alamo steps out of the shadow of her grandparents' idealized romance to take a chance on love. Three estranged sisters cruise to Glacier Bay to scatter their father's ashes. Two high school boys face unexpected fears in the Coney Island Spook House. A terrified bride-to-be ponders taking the leap...over Niagara Falls. Each story builds on the last to create a vivid travelogue of connections missed and connections made.

Transport Group’s Artistic Director Jack Cummings III says, “We are incredibly thrilled to finally have this magnificent show recorded. From workshop to production, See Rock City & Other Destinations was an absolute joy. We are looking forward to reuniting the amazing original cast and preserving their indelible performances. Michael Croiter and Yellow Sound Label are a wonderful company and we are very proud that they will be producing this album.”
The entire original cast will reunite for the recording to take place on August 19, 2012. The cast includes Stanley Bahorek (Queen of the Mist, February House, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee); Donna Lynne Champlin (Broadway’s Billy Elliot, Sweeney Todd, OBIE Award winner for TG’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs); Jonathan Hammond (Broadway’s Ragtime, OBIE Award winner The Boys in the Band); Ryan Hilliard (Off-Broadway’s Grey Gardens, Godspell); Mamie Parris (Ragtime, national tours of Wicked and 9 to 5), Bryce Ryness (Drama Desk Award nominee HAIR, Leap of Faith); and Sally Wilfert (Make Me a Song, Assassins).

The set and costume designs for See Rock City & Other Destinations were by Dane Laffrey (Drama Desk Award nominee The Boys in the Band); lighting design was by R. Lee Kennedy (Drama Desk Award nominee The Audience, Bury the Dead, and See Rock City & Other Destinations); casting was by Alan Filderman; Production Stage Manager was Theresa Flanagan; and Production Manager was Wendy Patten.

Prior to its New York premiere with Transport Group, See Rock City & Other Destinations received a developmental workshop with Transport Group in 2009. The musical received its world premiere at the Barrington Stage Company in 2008.
Brad Alexander (music) wrote the music for Theatreworks USA’s Click Clack Moo (dir. John Rando), Just So Stories, as well as songs for If You Give A Pig A Pancake and the upcoming We The People and Duck For President. He and Adam Mathias won the 2008 Richard Rodgers Award and 2007 Jerry Bock Award for See Rock City & Other Destinations. Brad’s music has been featured on VH1, Showtime and Sony Records. “Sugar and Spring,” a song he co-wrote with EdibleRed, is the first release off the band’s debut CD, Welcome To My Bad Behavior on Select Records. Brad is a member of The BMI Workshop, National Academy of Popular Music, National Alliance for Musical Theatre, and The Dramatists Guild of America. www.bradalexander.com

Adam Mathias (book, lyrics) was awarded the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical—as well as the Richard Rogers Award and the Jerry Bock Award—for See Rock City & Other Destinations. Adam co-wrote the 2004 New York International Fringe Festival hit The Passion of George W. Bush (also, Joe’s Pub.). As resident artist at Bakerloo Theatre Project, a classical theatre company, Adam wrote scores for The Tempest, 12th Night and The Imaginary Invalid, as well as creating Hamlet: What Dreams May Come, a four actor ninety-minute retelling of Shakespeare’s masterpiece. He is a long-standing member of the BMI Lehmann Engel Musical Theatre Writing Workshop (Jerry Harrington Award.). He has a BFA in playwriting from The Theatre School, DePaul University and an MFA in musical theatre writing from NYU, Tisch. Upcoming projects include A History of Summer, a musical history of Fire Island, with composer Jonathan Monro. www.adamup.com

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 stages new works and re-imagined revivals by American writers. Their visually progressive productions of emotionally classic stories explore the challenges of relationships and identity in America. Transport Group is the winner of a special Drama Desk Award for its “breadth of vision and its presentation of challenging productions.” Transport Group presented its premiere production in 2002: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which featured older actors 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. Other 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. Both First Lady Suite and Bury the Dead were filmed for the New York Performing Arts Library’s Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at Lincoln Center. In 2010 Transport Group presented a sold-out, extended engagement of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band, which received an OBIE Award and was nominated for five 2010 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Revival of a Play—the most for an off-Broadway play. Transport Group’s productions of See Rock City and Other Destinations by Brad Alexander and Adam Mathias, and Hello Again by Michael John LaChiusa combined for eleven 2011 Drama Desk Award nominations and one win. Transport Group’s production of Lysistrata Jones, by Douglas Carter Beane and Lewis Flinn, opened to rave reviews, played to sell-out houses, and transferred to Broadway’s Walter Kerr Theatre. The company’s most recent productions include a critically acclaimed run of The Patsy and Jonas at The Duke on 42nd Street, starring OBIE winner David Greenspan and Michael John LaChiusa’s world premiere musical, Queen of the Mist. The Patsy was nominated for both Outer Critics and Off-Broadway Alliance Awards. Queen of the Mist received the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical as well as 7 Drama Desk nominations, 2 Lucille Lortel and 2 Drama League nominations. For more information about Transport Group visit www.transportgroup.org.

Transport Group is currently in the middle of its 20th Century Project, a ten-year initiative spanning ten productions, each production focusing on a different decade of the 20th century. The ten productions comprise five musicals and five plays—including three commissioned musicals, two commissioned plays, and five revivals. Its most recent production, Queen of the Mist, was the project’s inaugural presentation.