BASTARD JONES Raises $10K 'Birthday Gift' for Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Fund

BASTARD JONES, a rock musical comedy opening tonight June 22nd at Nancy Manocherian's the cell (Artistic Director, Kira Simring), has raised $10,000 for Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Fund, dedicated to ending homelessness of LGBTQ youth.

Bastard Jones is based on Henry Fielding's bawdy 18th century novel, The History of Tom Jones. With book, lyrics, & direction by Marc Acito (Broadway's Allegiance) and music & lyrics by Amy Engelhardt (Grammy nominees The Bobs), the show opens on Cyndi Lauper's birthday, Thursday, June 22.

BASTARD JONES is a rollicking adventure of deception, misunderstanding and bed-hopping. It centers on Tom Jones, a bastard-born charmer with a heart of gold and a knack for trouble who's looking for love in all the wrong places. Tom gets banished from the only home he knows simply for expressing his true self, leading him to conscription in the army, a half-naked romp at a country inn and a stint as the boy-toy to an aristocrat whose machinations make Dangerous Liaisons look like child's play.

Because Bastard Jones is about young people being banished simply for being themselves, the authors and the cell theater decided to produce the show as a fundraiser, donating 100% of the production's proceeds to Cyndi Lauper's True Colors Fund.

"Our whole team wants Bastard Jones to stand for more than just the show itself," says writer-director Marc Acito. "It's our wacky vision for social change."

"As we kick off Pride weekend, we're proud to honor Cyndi Lauper's commitment to LGBTQ homeless youth," says Kira Simring, artistic director of the cell theatre, a flexible art/music/theater space that incubates new work. "This unconventional business model suits an unconventional show at an unconventional theater."

The show will continue to raise money for TCF throughout the limited run, which ends July 14th. To support the cell's fundraising campaign, visit www.gofundme.com/celljones.

Marc Acito (director, book writer, lyricist) wrote the book of the Broadway musical Allegiance, which New York Newsday recognized for its "well-structured book" and "fully developed characters." Acito's comedy Birds of a Feather won Washington DC's Helen Hayes Award for Best New Play. He won the Ken Kesey award for his novel How I Paid For College, which he adapted as a one-man musical starring Alex Brightman. Other projects include A Room With a View (Old Globe and 5th Avenue Theaters); Chasing Rainbows, about the adolescence of Judy Garland (Goodspeed Musicals); and It's A Secret, a musical in Mandarin for Broadway Asia in China. He's currently working on The Man in the Moon, an Ensemble Studio Theater / Sloan Foundation commission about the Apollo space program. A former commentator on NPR's All Things Considered, Acito now writes regularly for Playbill and teaches Musical Theater History and Story Structure at NYU.

Amy Engelhardt (composer-lyricist) was the sole female writer, arranger and vocalist with Grammy-nominated "band without instruments" The Bobs from 1998-2011. She has collaborated with some of the funniest people in comedy including Harry Shearer, Paul Provenza and Jane Lynch (the Christmas Without Tears tour 2005-2016) and the Flying Karamazov Brothers (writing music and lyrics for A Comedy of Eras at ACT Seattle). She is the Artistic Producer and Creator of Tune in Time, New York's Hit Musical Theater Game Show at the York Theatre. A frequent cabaret artist, she won the Manhattan Association of Cabaret and Club's award for songwriting. She is also the only female honorary member of the Vienna Boys Choir.

Nancy Manocherian's the cell is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the incubation and presentation of new works by emerging artists. Started in 2006 by Founding Artistic Director Nancy Manocherian and Artistic Director Kira Simring, the cell has produced over a dozen critically-acclaimed world premiere productions of new plays and musicals over the past 10 years. the cell also features the jazz @ the cell series and has served as a home base for a large community of resident artists and organizations such as Blackboard Reading Series, Artists Without Walls (AWOW), Irish American Writers and Artists (IAW), Sybarite5 and Tribeca New Music.