Theatrical Band SKY-PONY to Bring New Songs to National Sawdust for NYFOS Next Series

NYFOS Next at New York Festival of Song-concludes its season Wednesday, May 10 at 7:00 p.m. at National Sawdust with a theatrical evening from Lauren Worsham, Kyle Jarrow, and Sky-Pony.

Sky-Pony incorporates costumes, choreography and projections into its high-energy live shows. The band has made a career of blurring the lines of performance styles-between rock concert, theater and performance art, and burlesque. For their NYFOS Next show, they will explore the malleable boundaries between songwriting styles-pop vs. theater-song structures, for example, with some new songs hot off the press.

The Brooklyn-based band is a collaboration between husband-and-wife: the multi-talented Tony-nominated and Drama Desk Award-winning actress and singer Lauren Worsham and Obie award-winning writer, musician and songwriter Kyle Jarrow. The band also features the talents of guitarist Kevin Wunderlich, drummer Perry Silver, bassist Eric Day, cellist David Blasher, and backup singers Kristin Piacentile and Jessi Suzuki.

Sky-Pony created the performance piece The Wildness which premiered at Ars Nova in 2016. The piece was hailed by The New York Times as "defiantly exultant" and received a Lortel nomination for Outstanding Musical.

Soprano Lauren Worsham has been a NYFOS mainstay for many years, an audience favorite on the beloved MainStage series. With this NYFOS Next show, Lauren says, "I am so excited and honored to show the NYFOS audience the other side of my artistic life with my indie art-rock band Sky-Pony."

From Lauren and Kyle Jarrow: "We at Sky-Pony pride ourselves on our genre-bending performances mixing theater, indie-music and ceremony. With our NYFOS Next show we plan to showcase the many diverse sides of our sound, from new music to indie pop. Audiences can expect the unexpected with a side of divas, glitter and rock. And some new songs!"

This event concludes the seventh season of NYFOS Next, the moveable modern song salon that has found a new home at Brooklyn's much buzzed-about National Sawdust.

With an emphasis on spontaneity, novelty, and collaboration, NYFOS Next looks to the future, offering today's song composers a forum for their work. Audiences get an intimate look inside the creative process, as freshly-minted songs are offered-some for the first time-in an informal setting. Curator/hosts for past NYFOS Nexts include Bright Sheng, Paul Moravec, Gabriel Kahane, Joseph Thalken, Phil Kline, Carla Kilhstedt, Mohammed Fairouz, Kevin Puts, Russell Platt, Mark Adamo, John Musto, Harold Meltzer, David T. Little, Lowell liebermann, Gabriela Lena Frank and Christopher Cerrone.

Lauren Worsham is a Drama Desk and Theatre World Award-winning and Tony Award-nominated actress and singer. She originated the role of Phoebe in A Gentleman's Guide to Love and Murder (2014 Tony Award Best Musical). Other career highlights include creating the role of Lisa in Dog Days (Royce Vavrek and David T. Little) and performing such diverse roles as Magnolia in Show Boat with the New York Philharmonic, Flora in Turn of the Screw with New York City Opera, Amy in Where's Charley at New York Center Center Encores!, and Cunegonde in Candide with New York City Opera.

In addition to his work with Sky-Pony, Kyle Jarrow is an Obie Award-winning writer who creates work for the stage, film and television. Plays include A Very Merry Unauthorized Children's Scientology Pageant, Noir, Whisper House, Love Kills and Hostage Song. Kyle penned the film Armless, which was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival. He has developed television projects for FX, USA, FOX and CW networks, as well as the digital series Lost Generation (with music by Duncan Sheik) streaming now on Verizon's go90 platform.

Now in its 29th season, New York Festival of Song (NYFOS) is dedicated to creating intimate song concerts of great beauty and originality. Weaving music, poetry, history and humor into evenings of compelling theater, NYFOS fosters community among artists and audiences. Each program entertains and educates in equal measure.

Founded by pianists Michael Barrett and Steven Blier in 1988, NYFOS continues to produce its series of thematic song programs, drawing together rarely-heard songs of all kinds, overriding traditional distinctions between musical genres, exploring the character and language of other cultures, and the personal voices of song composers and lyricists.

Since its founding, NYFOS has particularly celebrated American song. Among the many highlights is the double bill of one-act comic operas, Bastianello and Lucrezia, by John Musto and William Bolcom, both with libretti by Mark Campbell, commissioned and premiered by NYFOS in 2008 and recorded on Bridge Records. In addition to Bastianello and Lucrezia and the 2008 Bridge Records release of Spanish Love Songs with Joseph Kaiser and the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, NYFOS has produced five recordings on the Koch label, including a Grammy Award-winning disc of Bernstein's Arias and Barcarolles, and the Grammy-nominated recording of Ned Rorem's Evidence of Things Not Seen (also a NYFOS commission) on New World Records. This past season saw the release of Canción Amorosa, a CD of Spanish song-Basque, Catalan, Castilian, and Sephardic-on the GPR label, with soprano Corinne Winters accompanied by Steven Blier.

In November 2010, NYFOS debuted NYFOS Next, a mini-series for new songs, hosted by guest composers in intimate venues. The series is currently held at National Sawdust in Brooklyn.

NYFOS is passionate about nurturing the artistry and careers of young singers, and has developed training residencies around the country, including with The Juilliard School's Ellen and James S. Marcus Institute for Vocal Arts (now in its 12th year); Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts (its 9th year in March 2017); San Francisco Opera Center (over 18 years as of February 2016); Glimmerglass Opera (2008-2010); and its newest project, NYFOS@North Fork in Orient, NY.

NYFOS's concert series, touring programs, radio broadcasts, recordings, and educational activities continue to spark new interest in the creative possibilities of the song program, and have inspired the creation of thematic vocal series around the world.