TNC Stages OUT THE WINDOW and RAPPACCINI'S DAUGHTER, Beginning Tonight

Theater for the New City, Crystal Field, Executive Director, and The After Dinner Opera Company present two new American operatic musical adaptations from classical works, Seymour Barab's operatic parody Out the Window based upon Georges Feydeux's farce "Par La Fenetre;" and Rappaccini's Daughter, based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's gothic short story, with libretto by Linsey Abrams and music by Michael Cohen. Lissa Moira directs. Performances will be staged at the Cino Theatre at Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue (bet. 9th and 10th Streets), New York, NY 10003 from tonight, September 11-28, 2014.

Out the Window

Set in the late 1950's/60's 'Mad Men' era, Out the Window is a one act comic opera adapted from Georges Feydeau's farce "Par La Fenetre." When a willful wife and hapless husband who don't happen to be married to each other get together to combat a scourge of jealously, will the cure turn out to be worse than the disease? Or, will love prevail?

Out the Window stars Lauren Hoffmeier and James Parks.

Seymour Barab (playwright/composer) - His proclivity for musical theatre has made his operas performed often, especially his comic one-acts and those for young audiences. According to Central Opera Service, during the 1988-89 season, he was the most performed composer of opera in America. His fellow composer, Miriam Gideon, called him "the Rossini of our time." His Little Red Riding Hood was the first American opera performed in China during the post-isolationist period. His highly praised full-length Civil War opera Philip Marshall, which uses Dostoyevsky's THE IDIOT as a point of departure, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Mr. Barab was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1921, and began his professional career as a church organist at the age of thirteen. Before leaving Chicago, he became a founder of the New Music Quartet, and then in New York City of the Composer's Quartet, in residence at Columbia University, whose primary purpose was to promote contemporary music. He played the viola da gamba and helped form the New York Pro Musica, one of the first contemporary ensembles to reintroduce baroque and Renaissance music. He was a member of the faculties of Rutgers University, Black Mountain College and the New England Conservatory of Music, although he was mainly self-taught in composition. Mr. Barab's musicianship included a stint at Birdland, playing in a small string orchestra accompanying Charlie Parker and Stan Getz. In the 1970s and 80s, Mr. Barab was a recording studio musician, performing on hundreds of popular recording with everyone from Elvis Presley to Frank Sinatra and John Lennon, as well as for television commercials and movie scores. The Toy Shop, commissioned by the New York City Opera, was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, and in 1998, scenes from the Pied Piper of Hamlin were also performed there, where he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by the National Opera Association. Mr. Barab passed away on June 28, 2014. Read his obituary in The New York Times.

Rappaccini's Daughter, a musical tale

Rappaccini's Daughter, from the story by Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a gripping Gothic tale set in medieval Italy. Two young lovers with their dreams of a shared future, become the victims of the brilliant Dr. Rappaccini, intent on changing the very laws of nature. No one is safe from his scientific experiments, not even his own daughter-and no one can stop him except, perhaps, for Professor Baglioni, an unheralded doctor committed to healing and humanity. The evil secret lies in a garden.

Rappaccini's Daughter stars Samantha Britt, William Broderick*, Darcy Dunn, Martin Fisher, and Douglas McDonnell with Michelle Lamb, Bryan Ernesto Menjivar, Michelle West, Masami Ishibashi, Amanda Yachechak, and Gloria Makino*.*Member, Actors' Equity Association. AEA Showcase.

Michael Cohen (composer) has enjoyed a diverse career including works for opera, musical theater, chamber ensemble, and television. His music has been performed by a wide range of singers, including Madeline Kahn, Janice Hall, Andrea Marcovicci, Timothy Nolan, Joyce Castle and Amy Burton. A graduate of The High School of Music and Art, The Dalcroze School of Music, and a cum laude graduate of Brandeis University, Michael studied composition with Harold Shapero and Irving Fine. Michael is the composer of three related pieces based on Anne Frank's diary: Yours, Anne and I Am Anne Frank (lyrics by Enid Futterman) and I Remember, a chamber work for mezzo-soprano, flute, harp and cello. Yours, Anne opened off-Broadway in 1985, and has since been performed throughout the country and in England, Belgium, Japan, Brazil, and Holland. I Am Anne Frank premiered at Lincoln Center with the American Symphony Orchestra at the first Spirit of Anne Frank Awards ceremony. I Remember premiered at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum Chamber Music Series. It has been performed in Amsterdam, at the prestigious Ravinia Festival in Chicago, at Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall, and in St. Louis, Miami, Sun Valley, Pittsburgh, Vancouver, and Voorburg, The Netherlands.

Linsey Abrams (librettist) is the author of three nationally-reviewed novels, "Our History in New York," "Double Vision," and "Charting by the Stars." Her short stories have appeared in Glimmer Train, The New Review of Literature, New Directions annual, Redbook, Mademoiselle, BOMB, The Reading Room, Harrington Lesbian Fiction Quarterly, Kalliope, Seattle Review, 13th Moon, Colorado Review, Central Park, Christopher Street, and other publications. Her work has been anthologized in such collections as Bantam's Best Short Fiction and Avon's Tasting Life Twice. She has also written essays on contemporary literature for The Mississippi Review, Global City Review, Quimera (Barcelona), The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Michigan Quarterly, the anthology Writers & Their Craft, and for broadcast on WNYC Radio. Her reviews have appeared in Belles Lettres, The New York Times Book Review and The Los Angeles Times Book Review. Linsey has read her work at many venues. She was a founding member of PEN American Center's Women's Committee. She was writer-in-residence at the Harvey Milk School, soon after it was founded as New York's LGBT high school in the 1980s.

Lissa Moira (director)AEA, SAG, AFTRA is also a playwright, screenwriter, lyricist, poet and artist. She more recently directed a 35-person cast in Nicholas Nickleby: A New Musical at Theatre for the New City, an adaptation by the late Robert Sickinger. Out of 5,000 world-wide submissions, Ms. Moira's play TIME IT IS was chosen as a top ten finalist in the prestigious Chesterfield/Paramount screenwriting competition. Ms. Moira's 2007 play Before God Was Invented was an American nominee for the Susan Brownell-Smith International Playwrights Award. Ms. Moira co-wrote "Dead Canaries," a feature film starring Charles Durning, Dan Lauria, Dee Wallace Stone and Joel Higgins. With co-writer Richard West, Lissa's well known for Sexual Psychobabble and The Best S*x of the XX Century Sale. Both ran over a year and each enjoyed critical and popular success. The Moira/West team's DaDa noir musical, Who Murdered Love? featured Broadway's Luba Mason and Tracy McDowell as well as William Broderick. It originated at Theater for the New City and ran at the Players Theatre as part of the 2012 FringeNYC (Ms. Moira directed as well). Other directing/co-writing credits include Sirens Heart: Norma Jeane and Marilyn in Purgatory (which enjoyed a 14-month Off-Broadway run at The Actor's Temple), and Tom Jones a new musical (Bloomberg Radio declared the directing "beautiful, fine and fresh"). Of her directing work on Cocaine Dreams, a play about Freud at The Kraine Theatre, the New York Post raved "inspired."

Out The Window and Rappaccini's Daughter are presented by Theater for the New City and The After Dinner Opera Company; Director: Lissa Moira; Musical Director: Jonathan Fox Powers; Choreographer: Robert Gonzales, Jr.; Costume Designer: Jennifer Anderson (The Lion King); Set Designer: Mark Marcante; Special Props & Artistic Effect: David "Zen" Mansley and Lytza Colon; Lighting Designer: Alex Bartenieff.

Tickets are $18 and can be purchased by visiting www.theaterforthenewcity.net/love.htm. 12 performances will be staged from September 11-28, 2014 on the following schedule: Thursday-Saturday at 8pm & Sunday at 3pm.

Theater for the New City is a Pulitzer Prize winning cultural center that is known for its high artistic standards and widespread community service. One of New York's most prolific theatrical organizations, TNC produces 30-40 premieres of new American plays per year, at least 10 of which are by emerging and young playwrights. Many influential theater artists of the last quarter century have found TNC's Resident Theater Program instrumental to their careers, among them Sam Shepard, Moises Kaufman, Richard Foreman, Charles Busch, Maria Irene Fornes, Miguel Piñero, Jean-Claude van Itallie, Vin Diesel, Oscar Nuñez, Laurence Holder, Romulus Linney and Academy Award Winners Tim Robbins and Adrien Brody. TNC also presents plays by multi-ethnic/multi-disciplinary theater companies who have no permanent home. Among the well-known companies that have been presented by TNC are Mabou Mines, the Living Theater, Bread and Puppet Theater, the San Francisco Mime Troupe and COBU, the Japanese women's drumming and dance group. TNC also produced the Yangtze Repertory Company's 1997 production of BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH, which was the only play ever produced in America by Gao Xingjian before he won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Literature. TNC seeks to develop theater audiences and inspire future theater artists from the often-overlooked low-income minority communities of New York City by producing minority writers from around the world and by bringing the community into theater and theater into the community through its many free Festivals. TNC productions have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and over 42 OBIE Awards for excellence in every theatrical discipline. TNC is also the only Theatrical Organization to have won the Mayor's Stop The Violence award.

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