Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival Announces Inaugural Season

Next summer Auburn, NY will be the setting for the first Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival season. The season will include productions at three separate venues: The Merry-Go-Round Playhouse, Auburn Public Theater, and the new Theater Mack, which will be housed in the recently renovated Carriage House located on the grounds of the Cayuga Museum. The 2012 schedule will include six productions at the Merry-Go-Round Playhouse and three productions on the Auburn Public Theater Main Stage. The Festival will also include THE PITCH, an innovative concept that will feature over a dozen new musicals in their earliest stages of development.

The schedule at the Playhouse will run from May 30th to October 20th and include: Kiss Me Kate, 9 to 5: The Musical, My Fair Lady, Cabaret, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, and the original Nunsense. Featured on the Main Stage of the Auburn Public Theatre will be three regional premiers: Altar Boyz, My Mother's Lesbian Jewish Wiccan Wedding, and Fingers & Toes.

THE PITCH was created to allow the next generation of musical theatre playwrights and composers to engage in an exchange of ideas with a live audience. This unique series will be presented in the intimate Theater Mack space from June 14th through August 18th.

This announcement comes on the heels of a successful pilot production this past summer at the Auburn Public Theater. Cooking with the Calamari Sisters had to be extended for three weeks and was virtually sold out for its entire six week, 49-performance run. In all, over 8,500 were in attendance, with nearly a third of those visitors travelling from outside of Central New York. The Musical Theatre Festival, Inc. was established to create a multi-venue theatre festival that will become a destination for musical theatre in the nation, initially drawing more than 100,000 visitors annually, and in the process, having a transformational impact on Central New York and the Finger Lakes Region.

The Festival was made possible by the support of its founding donors: the Allyn Foundation, Fred L. Emerson Foundation, Stardust Foundation of Central New York, Schwartz Family Foundation, the City of Auburn, and Cayuga County. To date, the Festival has raised over $7.5 million.

For more information about the history and the future of the Festival, visit www.FingerLakesMTF.com.

 

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