Joe's Pub at The Public to Welcome Jamie Leonhart & Joanna Settle, 11/1-3

As part of the artist commissioning program New York Voices, Joe's Pub at The Public presents Estuary: an artist/mother story, a new show conceived and written by Jamie Leonhart and directed by Joanna Settle. Estuary's original music is co-written and arranged by Grammy-winner Michael Leonhart. This presentation of Estuary features a live band that includes Saskia Lane, Pauline Kim, Sara Phillips Budde and Katie Scheele. Performances will run Monday through Wednesday, November 1-3 at 7:00PM at Joe's Pub at The Public (425 Lafayette, NYC). Tickets are ($20) available now online, via phone (212.967.7555) or in-person at The Public's Box Office.

Estuary is a musical exploration of the challenges and unanticipated realities of being an artist and becoming a new parent. Thrown into the insane world of everything "baby," Leonhart confronted changes not only to her artistic work but to her relationship to her husband, Michael, also a player and the only male in the show. While Estuary is an examination of a very personal, transitional zone of Leonhart's life, it is meant to trigger conversation about what it can look like for others - the difficult place where something so wonderful and rewarding is also hard and confusing. She is unflinching in her candor as she sings about conflict, loneliness and the anger that accompany the collision of mother and artist.

Settle said, "This commission created an incredibly welcoming home for Jamie and I to wander into the night of how Motherhood and Art Making collided in Jamie's life. It seems we art moms are all riding the highs and lows of striving to make it all work. Joe's Pub makes it possible for artists to dig deep and have fun doing it."

As part of The Public Theater's long history of cultivating the country's most celebrated artists, New York Voices supports the creation of new works by critically-acclaimed musicians and performers. Shanta Thake, Director of Joe's Pub at The Public said, "Jamie has always been one of my favorite lyricists and song interpreters. Her beautiful and heartbreaking new work about the challenges of being a working artist and mother is a beautiful take on a narrative often unheard."

Leonhart and Settle are part of the 2015-2016 class of New York Voices, which also includes Joey Arias with Jose Manuel Lopez Velarde; Daniel Alexander Jones; and Justin Vivian Bond and Kenny Mellman.

Jamie Leonhart is known as a sharp-witted chanteuse, who refuses to be categorized; she is dynamic in emotional range and diverse in genre-crossing ability. She explores a new hybrid of popular music - part jazz, part indie-pop, part quirky cabaret with a bit of torch song to round it out. Live, her audience becomes a collective co-conspirator as she intones her confessions, dissatisfactions and desires, supported by arrangements that move from somber to playfully bombastic. Leonhart's approachable demeanor belies powerhouse vocals and some of the most innovative compositions of the day - she delivers intricate melodies with warmth and simplicity.

Her voice has drawn comparisons to the likes of Norah Jones, Feist, Madeleine Peyroux and even Sarah Vaughan. Leonhart's lithe and lyrical, three-and-a-half octave voice wraps around universe in which Kurt Weill and Laura Nyro meet Alice in Wonderland in a dimly-lit jazz club, inhabited by woodwinds, strings, vibraphone, and exotic instruments like the glockenspiel, mellotron and harmonium. Leonhart works as both a commercial voiceover artist and vocalist (Lifetime, Oxygen, Kohl's, Betty Crocker and more) in addition to background and session work (Donald Fagen, St. Vincent, Judy Kun, Paul Brill). Her debut record the truth about suffering was released on Sunnyside Records in 2010.

Joanna Settle recently directed Rapture, Blister, Burn for the Wilma Theater, Heather Raffo's Fallujah for the Kennedy Center and Stew's The Total Bent for The Public Theater. In addition to her New York Voices commission with Jamie Leonhart, she will direct An Octoroon at The Wilma in February 2016. Other credits include Winter Miller's In Darfur for The Public; the finale of Suzan-Lori Parks's 365 Days/365 Plays; Stephen Brown's Future Me; Slither by Carson Kreitzer; and the South American tour of Grease! The Musical. She directed Heather Raffo's Nine Parts of Desire at Manhattan Ensemble Theater, and restaged the production for the Geffen Playhouse, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art, MassMOCA, Seattle Repertory Theatre and D.C.'s Arena Stage.

Settle was Artistic Director of Division 13 Productions from 1998 - 2004, and Artistic Director of Shakespeare on the Sound from 2009-2012. Settle has taught in the Brown University/Trinity Rep MFA Directing Program, at Bard College, Stanford University PhD Program, and is currently the Director of the Ira Brind School of Theater Arts at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

New York Voices is the artist commissioning program of Joe's Pub at The Public. As part of The Public's long history of cultivating the country's most celebrated artists, the program supports the creation of new works by critically-acclaimed musicians and performers. Encouraging artists to explore their own storytelling, narratives and songwriting, New York Voices includes a development workshop with The Public's artistic staff as well as practical resources like rehearsal space, time and financial backing. Each commission culminates with a run of live shows on the Joe's Pub stage. New York Voices has experienced great success in helping artists connect with their contemporaries and reach wider audiences - many of the program's works have gone on to tour nationally and internationally.

Artists commissioned by the program include Abigail Washburn, Bridget Everett, Noche Flamenca, Toshi Reagon, Lady Rizo, Allen Toussaint, Angelique Kidjo, Dawn Landes, Martha Redbone and Ethan Lipton. Everett's Rock Bottom and Lipton's No Place To Go have both won Obie Awards.

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