Symphony Space Announces Highlights of 2021-22 Season

Symphony Space will make a momentous return to its building with a 2021-2022 season that brings the beloved cultural institution's signature programs-Selected Shorts, Wall to Wall, and Bloomsday on Broadway-to new heights, and with greater reach. Symphony Space's 2020-2021 virtual events engaged audiences in all 50 states, Puerto Rico, Washington, D.C., and 56 countries. The organization has now upgraded its Peter Jay Sharp Theater and Leonard Nimoy Thalia Theater with state-of-the-art equipment to capture and stream performances, and will present select future works within the space both in-person and, virtually, to viewers around the world. Tickets go on sale in August, when additional season programming will be revealed.

Executive Director Kathy Landau says, "What defines Symphony Space is our unique convening of artists and writers. We say to them, 'bring your art, your ideas, and your community' and what comes of that is the creation of unique works that happen one-night-only, and only at Symphony Space. We give our artists the time, the space, and the stage to create, collaborate, and take risks. This season is built around a magnificent array of artists and important milestone events, and we can imagine no better way to once again throw open our doors and welcome in people from all over-including our growing national and international audiences who found out about us during the last year."

Symphony Space traces its beginnings to Wall to Wall Bach, a 12-hour music festival conceived by playwright-director Isaiah Sheffer and conductor Allan Miller in 1978. Based on the success of the event, Sheffer and Miller decided to lease the building and transform it into a permanent cultural venue. Over the more than four decades since-in the same space-the organization has presented Wall to Wall marathons of music by wide-ranging composers including Leonard Bernstein, John Coltrane, Miles Davis, and Stephen Sondheim.

On March 26, 2022, Symphony Space bridges the series with another of its most recognizable, longest-running programs in Wall to Wall Selected Shorts, the organization's first literary Wall to Wall. This monumental event celebrates-and expands upon-the literature-in-performance series in which notable screen and stage actors read classic and new short fiction before a live audience. (The Selected Shorts podcast and syndicated public radio broadcast reach hundreds of thousands of listeners worldwide.) For Wall to Wall Selected Shorts, Symphony Space has commissioned 35 new short stories from authors including Michael Cunningham, Edwidge Danticat, Dave Eggers, and Carmen Maria Machado, and is also commissioning choreographers, musicians, and filmmakers-Heidi Latsky, Larry Owens, and Adam Douglas Thompson among them-to realize the new stories across disciplines. All the works will be performed at a free, all-day event. The full slate of commissioned artists and performers will be announced at a later date.

On May 14, 2022, Symphony Space holds the 50th music event in the Wall to Wall series-and meets the occasion with a tribute to multi-hyphenate Quincy Jones. Over the course of a seven-decade career as a composer, musician, arranger, and producer, Jones has won scores of honors, including 28 GRAMMY Awards (and garnered a staggering 80 nominations), tying him with Alison Krauss as the most awarded living person, and making him the second-highest GRAMMY winner of all time.

Kathy Landau explains, "Quincy Jones' towering genius and his extraordinary body of work make him the ideal artist to honor at our 50th Wall to Wall. His global impact crosses genres, generations, disciplines, and cultures. Wall to Wall events are deep and immersive, expansive and probing, and this tribute to Quincy will be a glorious gathering of musicians, singers, dancers, actors, and more, and a day-long, nonstop celebration. And, all of it will be free and open to the public, as every Wall to Wall has been since our founding."

Symphony Space's annual Bloomsday on Broadway offers artists the chance to apply their own vision to the James Joyce masterpiece Ulysses, displaying across the decades the vast inspiration a brilliant work can have, the prismatic interpretations it can provoke, and the many forms in which it can live on. In 2022, Ulysses turns 100, and Symphony Space marks the occasion with a newly commissioned production from Elevator Repair Service (ERS), hailed for their theatricalization of literary classics, on June 16, 2022. With a cast including Daphne Gaines, Maggie Hoffman, Vin Knight, April Matthis, and Scott Shepherd, ERS will offer excerpts of the Ulysses work-in-progress as part of this year's virtual, 40th anniversary Bloomsday event, Bloomsday on Broadway xxX (June 16, 2021), recorded in Symphony Space's Peter Jay Sharp Theatre.

Genre-spanning musical residencies, too, will reactivate the building in the coming season. Resident musicians this season will include Grammy-nominated saxophonist, bandleader, and composer Ravi Coltrane (February 3-5, 2022) and eleven-time Grammy nominee Meshell Ndegeocello (February 24-26, 2022).

For more information, visit symphonyspace.org or call 212-864-5400. Symphony Space is located at 2537 Broadway at 95th Street.

To post a comment, you must register and login.