Reading of THE CAROUSEL OF INEVITABILITY AND CERTAIN FOREBODING Comes to Lincoln Center

Autumn Hurlbert (Legally Blonde, Little Women, On the Town), Bruce Sabath (Company, Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish), Akron Lanier Watson (The Color Purple, The Play That Goes Wrong, Hamilton), Anne Brummel (Wicked, My Fair Lady), Sam Balzac (Hay Fever at Lincoln Center, Carly Gendell (School of Rock), Diego Lucano (School of Rock, Sing Street), and Kenny Harmon (A Note of Explanation at Lincoln Center) are set to star in the premiere performance of the new musical The Carousel of Inevitability and Certain Foreboding on Thursday, November 16th at 6pm at the Bruno Walter Auditorium at Lincoln Center. 

After Doug Reside, curator of the Billy Rose Theatre Division at New York Public Library, realized that emerging musical theatre artists had little opportunity to meet each other in professional settings, he launched Across a Crowded Room. Since 2014, the incubator event has connected lyricists, composers, book writers, and performers to collaborate and ultimately create new twenty-minute musical theatre pieces to present at the Library for the Performing Arts. 

This year, for the first time, past participants of the annual Across a Crowded Room events were offered the chance to apply for a fellowship for the work created during any year of the event. NYPL has awarded this inaugural fellowship to musical theatre team A. J. Freeman, Gil Varod, and Jonathon Lynch for their piece The Carousel of Inevitability and Certain Foreboding. The collaborators presented an earlier version of their musical-in-progress through an online event in 2020.

The trio's new full-length musical centers around the final ride of a classic World's Fair-era audio-animatronic show at Digsbyland, the most popular theme park in America. Although the main characters, Donna and Jimmy, have complicated feelings about the attraction (as well as their own histories with the Kurt Digsby Corporation) it seems they scored tickets! These lifelike robots sure do appear friendly as they sing about electric ovens and humanity's progress as dictated by a multinational corporate sponsor. But what if their frequent mechanical failures indicate something far more horrific than faulty hydraulics? And moreover—IS the future inevitable?

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