Roundabout to Present Saltzman Shaped Berlin & Joplin Musical TIN PAN ALLEY RAG for Summer 2009

Roundabout Theatre Company (Todd Haimes, Artistic Director) is proud to announce the New York premiere of the new musical The Tin Pan Alley Rag, written by Mark Saltzman, with Music & Lyrics by Irving Berlin & Scott Joplin, directed by Stafford Arima.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag will begin performances on Friday, June 12th and open officially on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre (111 West 46th Street). This production marks the first time a musical has been presented in this theatrical space.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag will feature choreography by Liza Gennaro and musical direction by Michael Patrick Walker. Additional cast and design team members will be announced shortly.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag tells the story of an imagined meeting of two of America's greatest musicians, composer Scott Joplin and songwriter Irving Berlin. Joplin was a musical prodigy, born the son of a slave, who received a conservatory education and slowly rose to acclaim. Berlin was a Russian Jewish immigrant who couldn't read music, yet catapulted to stardom at the age of 23. Both men changed the landscape of music forever with their contributions to the first American musical genre, ragtime. Beneath Joplin and Berlin's toe-tapping, syncopated rhythms lay fascinating stories of fame, love and loss. In The Tin Pan Alley Rag, these tales come to vivid life and two great icons realize they have more in common than they ever suspected.

The score for The Tin Pan Alley Rag includes such classic songs as Irving Berlin's "I Love a Piano", "Play a Simple Melody", "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" & "The Entertainer", among others.

The Roundabout Theatre Company production is presented in association with Rodger Hess Productions, Inc.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag was most recently seen in January 2006, at the Maltz Jupiter Theatre in Jupiter, FL.

Tickets are available by calling Roundabout Ticket Services at (212)719-1300, online at www.roundabouttheatre.org or at the Laura Pels Theatre at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre box office (111 West 46 Street). Ticket prices range from $75.00-$85.00. The Tin Pan Alley Rag will play a limited engagement through Sunday, September 6th.

The Tin Pan Alley Rag will play Tuesday through Saturday evening at 7:30 p.m. with Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday matinees at 2:00 p.m.

Mark Saltzman (Author). Mark Saltzman began his career in N.Y. with Jim Henson, writing for the Muppets. His Sesame Street sketches and songs (including Caribbean Amphibian) earned him seven Emmy Awards. But behind Kermit's back, Mark was writing cabaret shows and musicals that played at The Ballroom, Soho Rep, 13th Street Theater, and the Village Gate, where he co-wrote the long-running revue A, My Name is Alice. For CBS television, Mark wrote Mrs. Santa Claus, the holiday musical starring Angela Lansbury with songs by Jerry Herman. For the movies, he wrote The Adventures of Milo and Otis and Three Ninjas Kick Back and has written screenplays for SONY, Universal, and Disney. His TV movie, The Red Sneakers, directed by and starring Gregory Hines, aired on Showtime in 2004 and was nominated for a Writers Guild Award. That was followed by "Third Man Out" a tv movie for the Here! Network that launched the Donald Strachey series. In 2007, Mark served as writer-producer of the Disney Channel tv show "Johnny and the Sprites" starring John Tartaglia. Mark's musical comedy, Romeo and Bernadette, played at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami and New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse. His play, Mr. Shaw Goes to Hollywood, based on the 1933 visit of George Bernard Shaw to the MGM studio, premiered at the Laguna Playhouse in April 2003. His play, Clutter, had its world premier at the Colony Theater in Burbank on February 7 of 2004 and his most recent play, Set Up and Punch opens May 2009 at L.A.'s Blank Theater Company. Always a lover of vintage musical theater, Mark was honored in 2002 to adapt the Show Boat for a Hollywood Bowl performance featuring William Warfield. Mark is a graduate of Cornell University and is proud of his ongoing role as a mentor in the National Young Playwrights Festival, produced every year in L.A. by the Blank Theatre Company. He is also president of the Arnold Glassman Fund, a charitable foundation that provides grants for documentary film projects.

Irving Berlin (Music & Lyrics). Born Israel Beilin in a Russian Jewish shtetl in 1888, he died as Irving Berlin in his adopted homeland of New York, New York, U.S.A. in 1989. Songwriter, performer, theatre owner, music publisher and soldier, he definEd Jerome Kern's famous maxim: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music. He IS American music." Berlin wrote over 1200 songs, including "White Christmas," "Puttin' on the Ritz," "Easter Parade," "Always," "Blue Skies," "Cheek to Cheek," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "Alexander's Ragtime Band" and "God Bless America." He wrote the scores to more than a dozen Broadway musicals, including Annie Get Your Gun, and provided songs for dozens of Hollywood movie musicals. Since 2004, the new stage musical of his movie musicAl White Christmas has been staged in nearly fifty cities in the US, Canada and the UK, and its Broadway premiere earlier this season broke box office records. An unabashed patriot, his love for, and generosity to, his country is legendary, and through several of his ongoing foundations, including The God Bless America Fund, he has donated millions of dollars in royalties to Army Emergency relief, the Boy and Girl Scouts and other organizations. Among his many awards and accolades were the Academy Award for "White Christmas," a Congressional Gold Medal, a special Tony Award and posthumous commemoration on a U.S. postage stamp.

Scott Joplin (Music & Lyrics). Scott Joplin, the "King of Ragtime" music, was born near Linden, Texas on November 24, 1868. He moved with his family to Texarkana at the age of about seven. Even at this early age, Joplin demonstrated his extraordinary talent for music. Encouraged by his parents, he was already proficient on the banjo, and was beginning to play the piano. By age eleven and under the tutelage of Julius Weiss, he was learning the finer points of harmony and style. As a teenager, he worked as a dance musician. After several years as an itinerant pianist playing in saloons and brothels throughout the Midwest, he settled in St. Louis about 1890. There he studied and led in the development of a music genre now known as ragtime--a unique blend of European classical styles combined with African American harmony and rhythm. In 1893, Joplin played in sporting areas adjacent to the Colombian Exposition in Chicago, and the following year moved to Sedalia, Missouri. From there, he toured with his eight-member Texas Medley Quartette as far east as Syracuse, New York. One of his first compositions, The Great Crush Collision, was inspired by a spectacular railroad locomotive crash staged near Waco, Texas in September of 1896. In the late 1890s, Joplin worked at the Maple Leaf Club in Sedalia, which provided the title for his best known composition, the Maple Leaf Rag, published in 1899. This was followed a few years later by The Entertainer, another well known Joplin composition. Over the next fifteen years, Joplin added to his already impressive repertoire, which eventually totaled some sixty compositions. In 1911, Joplin moved to New York City, where he devoted his energies to the production of his operatic work, Treemonisha, the first grand opera composed by an African American. At the time, however, this resulted unsuccessfully. After suffering deteriorating health due to syphilis that he contracted some years earlier, Joplin died on April 1, 1917 in Manhattan State Hospital. Although Joplin's music was popular and he received modest royalties during his lifetime, he did not receive recognition as a serious composer for more than fifty years after his death. Then, in 1973, his music was featured in the motion picture, The Sting, which won an Academy Award for its film score. Three years later, in 1976, Joplin's opera Treemonisha won the coveted Pulitzer Prize.

Stafford Arima (Director) directed Altar Boyz, which received the Best Musical Outer Critics Circle Award, was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Musical, and is currently running in its 5th year Off-Broadway. He directed the West End premiere of a reconceived production of Ragtime, which was recognized with 8 Olivier Award nominations including Best Director and Best Musical. Additional credits include: The Princess and the Black-Eyed Pea (San Diego Rep.); Esther Demsack (SPF Festival); Candide (San Francisco Symphony); Ace (The Old Globe); The Secret Garden (World AIDS Day concert); Bright Lights, Big City (Prince Music Theater); Abyssinia (Goodspeed Musicals); Marry Me a Little (Cincinnati Playhouse); Guys and Dolls (Paper Mill Playhouse); A Tribute to Stephen Sondheim (Boston Pops); Chef's Theater (The Supper Club); Rags - In Concert (Nokia Theater); Bowfire (PBS television special); Total Eclipse (TSP Studio Theatre, Toronto); and Children's Letters to God (Off-Broadway). Arima's Broadway credits as associate director include A Class Act and Seussical. He is a graduate of York University (Toronto) where he was the recipient of the Dean's Prize for Excellence in Creative Work. Special thanks to Daisy Arima.

Rodger Hess PRODUCTIONS (Producer). Broadway: Macbeth, Six Dance Lessons In Six Weeks, Wait Until Dark, 1776, Annie: 20th Anniversary Production, Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jelly's Last Jam, Leader of the Pack, The Five O'Clock Girl. Off-Broadway: Italian-Jewish-Therapy, My Old Lady, Water Coolers, Cowgirls, Fallen Angel, Potholes, Blame It On The Movies, How I Got That Story. Touring: The Tin Pan Alley Rag, Annie:The National Tour, Swing, Six Dance Lessons In SixWeeks, Finian's Rainbow, A Chorus Line, Evita, Elvis: A Musical Celebration. Created and produced the following worldwide arena touring shows starring the Warner Bros. and DC Comics Cartoon characters: Bugs Bunny Follies, Bugs Bunny Meets The Superheroes, Bugs Bunny In Space, Bugs Bunny Sports Spectacular, Bugs Bunny Circus. Miscellaneous: Nintendo World Championships. "The Pueblo" (Arena Stage, Washington D.C., ABC-TV Emmy Award).

ROUNDABOUT THEATRE COMPANY is one of the country's leading not-for-profit theatres. The company contributes invaluably to New York's cultural life by staging the highest quality revivals of classic plays and musicals as well as new plays by established writers. Roundabout consistently partners great artists with great works to bring a fresh and exciting interpretation that makes each production relevant and important to today's audiences.

Roundabout Theatre Company currently produces at three permanent homes each of which is designed specifically to enhance the needs of the Roundabout's mission. Off-Broadway, the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre, which houses the Laura Pels Theatre and Black Box Theatre, with its simple sophisticated design is perfectly suited to showcasing intimate plays and musicals. The grandeur of its Broadway home on 42nd Street, American Airlines Theatre, sets the ideal stage for the classics. Roundabout's Studio 54 provides an exciting and intimate Broadway venue for its musical and special event productions. Together these three distinctive venues serve to enhance the work on each of its stages.

American Airlines is the official airline of Roundabout Theatre Company. Roundabout productions are made possible, in part, with public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, the National Endowment for the Arts; and the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation. American Express is the 2008-2009 season sponsor of the Roundabout Theatre Company.

Roundabout Theatre Company's 2008-2009 season includes Lisa Loomer's Distracted featuring Cynthia Nixon, directed by Mark Brokaw; Christopher Hampton's The Philanthropist, starring Matthew Broderick, directed by David Grindley; Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, starring (in order of speaking) Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, John Goodman, John Glover, directed by Anthony Page. Roundabout's sold out production of The 39 Steps made its second Broadway transfer to the Helen Hayes Theatre on January 21, 2009.

Roundabout Theatre Company's 2009-2010 season includes Patrick Marber's After Miss Julie, starring Sienna Miller, directed by Mark Brokaw; Michael Stewart, Lee Adams and Charles Strouse's Bye Bye Birdie, directed and choreographed by Robert Longbottom; Noël Coward's Present Laughter starring Victor Garber, directed by Nicholas Martin.

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