Transport Group to Present THE MEMORY SHOW, Starring Leslie Kritzer and Catherine Cox, Beginning 4/16

Transport Group, the Drama Desk and OBIE award-winning theatre company, has announced that the New York premiere of a new musical, The Memory Show, book and lyrics by Sara Cooper; music by Zach Redler; directed by Joe Calarco, will begin performances Tuesday, April 16, at 7pm at The Duke on 42nd Street, a New 42nd Street project, at 229 West 42nd Street. The Memory Show features Catherine Cox and Leslie Kritzer. Opening night is scheduled for Tuesday, April 30 at 7pm.

Showing up is half the battle...and then there's the other half. When a daughter comes home to care for her aging mother, memory is only one land mine in the new musical The Memory Show. Conflicting versions of the past collide in this honest and darkly funny portrait of a mother, a daughter, and their inescapable relationship.

Catherine Cox most recently appeared as Janet in Vote for Me (NYMF) and just prior to that, she received wonderful notices for her works as "Mother" in the world premiere of The Memory Show at Barrington Stage Company. Her Broadway credits include leading roles in Footloose, Oh, Coward! (Tony Nomination), Baby (Drama Desk Award), Rumors, Music Is, Whoopee!, Barnum, and One Night Stand. Off-Broadway, she has appeared in William Finn's In Trousers, Rap Master Ronnie, By Strouse, It's Better With A Band and The Waves. Directing credits: Baby, Quilters, Once on this Island, Seussical, Bye Bye Birdie, and A, My Name is Alice. Catherine is an adjunct professor for the Drama Department at Queens College and currently teaches Musical Theater Performance at AMDA (American Musical and Dramatic Academy) in New York.

Leslie Kritzer is about to have her own show at Joe's Pub where her 2006 SRO debut Leslie Kritzer is Patti LuPone at Les Mouches created a sensation earning her a TimeOut NY Award. Her Broadway credits include Sondheim on Sondheim, A Catered Affair(Drama Desk Nomination), Legally Blonde (Clarence Derwent Award for Most Promising Performer) and Hairspray. Off-Broadway and regional credits include Judas and Me, (NYMF-2009 Outstanding Individual Performance Award), Rooms: A Rock Romance (Outer Critics Circle Nomination), On The Town (Encores!), The Great American Trailer Park Musical (Drama Desk Nomination), Bat Boy, Godspell, The Memory Show, Damn Yankees, the world premiere of POP! (Yale Rep), Regional: Three Generations (Kennedy Center),Cabaret, Born Yesterday, the world premiere of Vanities, Urinetown (National Tour), Evita, and Funny Girl.

Zach Redler is an active composer, pianist, arranger, copyist, musicologist and musical director in and out of New York City. Recent productions as composer: The Memory Show (Barrington Stage; NAMT Festival of New Musicals; reading, Barrington Stage Company, lyrics by Sara Cooper); Loving Leo (Workshop at ATF July 2010); May Day (GMTWP Reading); Adeyele (short musical, GMTWP Reading); Perez Hilton Saves the Universe (Best Musical Fringe Festival 2008 and Best Musical in the Talkin' Broadway 2008 Summer Theatre Festival Citations). Zach's music has been performed at Lincoln Center, Merkin Hall, Joe's Pub and many other venues in and out of New York City. Music Directing/Assistant Music Directing credits: Damn Yankees, Rent, One, Golden Apple, A Little Night Music. Broadway: Xanadu. Off Broadway: H.M.S. Pinafore, Captain Louie, Marriage of Better and Boo. He is a member of ASCAP, Local 802 and a graduate of NYU Tisch's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

Sara Cooper is a graduate of the Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, as well as the undergraduate Dramatic Writing Program, at the Tisch School of the Arts (NYU). Bookwriting and lyric credits include: "The Memory Show" (music by Zach Redler); Loving Leo (music by Zach Redler); "The Tenth Floor," (book only) - Next Link Project, New York Musical Theatre Festival (2010), Talkin' Broadway 2010 Summer Theatre Festival Citations: Outstanding New Musical (2010);"The Yehuatl" (20-minute musical, music by Jaime Lozano), Lee Strasberg Institute (2009), Dramatists Guild Friday Night Footlights (2008); "A Corpse In The Kitchen" (one-act play), Shandaken Theatrical Society PlayFair (2008), Lower East Side Festival at Theater for the New City (2008); "EMERGENCY CONTRACEPTION!: THE MUSICAL," Theater for the New City (2007); Sara is a Teaching Artist at Lincoln Center and is a member of the Dramatists Guild and ASCAP, and is represented by Jessica Amato at the Gersh Agency.

Vadim Feichtner was most recently the Musical Director/Conductor/Dance Arranger for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (Broadway, Boston, S.F., Chicago, and touring companies). As a composer he contributed music to William Finn'sSongs of Innocence and Experience which received its premiere at Williams College, as well as co-wrote (with Mr. Finn) the incidental music for the NY Public Theatre's production of As You Like It in Central Park. This past Spring saw a retrospective of Vadim's career with lyricist Jeremy Desmon at Joe's Pub entitled Desmon & Feichtner Continue to Disappoint Their Parents. Recent credits includeElegies, Ordinary Days, The Burnt Part Boys, The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown, Dogfight, and the new Finn/Lapine adaption of Little Miss Sunshine. Vadim is an alumnus of the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.

Joe Calarco is the adaptor/director of Shakespeare's R&J. which ran for a year Off-Broadway, becoming the longest running version of Romeo and Juliet in New York history, and earned him a Lucille Lortel Award. He also directed the play's premieres in Chicago (5 Jeff Award nominations including Best Play and Best Director) and Washington, D.C. (Helen Hayes Award nominations for Best Play and Best Director). He also directed the premieres in London's West End (Evening Standard Award honorable mention for Best Director) and in Tokyo. He served as resident playwright at Expanded Arts, Inc. for two years. He has been a Joseph Papp artist in residence at Second Stage, is one of New York Theatre Workshop's "usual suspects," and is a Drama League directing fellow. He also sits on the executive board of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society (SDC). Graduate: Ithaca College.

The set design for The Memory Show is by Brian Prather; costume design is by Kathryn Rohe; lighting design is by Chris Lee; sound design is by Walter Trarbach; music direction is by Vadim Feitchner; orchestrations are by Lynn Shankel; the stage manager is Theresa Flanagan.

Founded in 2001, Transport Group, under the leadership of Jack Cummings III, Artistic Director, and Lori Fineman, Executive Director, is a not-for-profit theatre company that stages new works and re-imagined revivals by American writers. Their visually progressive productions of emotionally classic stories explore the challenges of relationships and identity in America. Transport Group is the winner of a special Drama Desk Award for its "breadth of vision and its presentation of challenging productions." Transport Group presented its premiere production in 2002: Thornton Wilder's Our Town, which featured older actors in the roles of Emily and George and a twelve-year-old girl as the Stage Manager. Its second production, Requiem for William, an evening of seven seldom produced plays by William Inge, that featured a cast of 26 as well as original songs, premiered in 2003. In 2004 the company presented the first New York revival of Michael John LaChiusa's First Lady Suite, which received rave reviews, played to sold-out houses, and earned two Drama Desk Award nominations including Outstanding Revival of a Musical. Other productions include the world premiere of the musical The Audience, which featured a cast of 46 actors and earned three Drama Desk Award nominations, including Outstanding Musical; Normal, a new musical about a mother's battle to save her daughter from anorexia; cul-de-sac, a new play by Tony Award nominee John Cariani; the first New York revival of Tad Mosel's Pulitzer Prize play, All the Way Home; the 50th anniversary, OBIE-winning production of William Inge's The Dark at the Top of the Stairs; the world premiere musicals Crossing Brooklyn, Marcy in the Galaxy, and Being Audrey, and the first New York revival of Irwin Shaw's Bury the Dead. Both First Lady Suite and Bury the Dead were filmed for the New York Performing Arts Library's Theatre on Film and Tape Archive at Lincoln Center. In 2010 Transport Group presented a sold-out, extended engagement of Mart Crowley's The Boys in the Band, which received an OBIE Award and was nominated for five 2010 Drama Desk Awards, including Outstanding Revival of a Play-the most for an off-Broadway play. Transport Group's productions of See Rock City and Other Destinations by Brad Alexander and Adam Mathias, and Hello Again by Michael John LaChiusa combined for eleven 2011 Drama Desk Award nominations and one win. Transport Group's production of Lysistrata Jones, by Douglas Carter Beane and Lewis Flinn, opened to rave reviews, played to sell-out houses, transferred to Broadway, and was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical. In 2011, the company produced a critically acclaimed run of The Patsy and Jonas at The Duke on 42nd Street, starring OBIE winner David Greenspan and Michael John LaChiusa's world premiere musical, Queen of the Mist, winner of the 2012 Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New off-Broadway Musical. Most recently, Transport Group produced the world premiere of House for Sale, an essay by National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Franzen adapted for the stage and directed by Daniel Fish.

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