11th Hour Closes Season with Next Step Concert Series Performance of BROADCAST

11th Hour Theatre Company's 12th season comes to a close with its final Next Step Concert Series performance. This time the series features a new musical by Nathan Christensen and Scott Murphy, Broadcast. Broadcast comes to the Next Step Concert Series June 23-25. Steve Pacek, 11th Hour's Associate Artistic Director and Co-Founder, directs. Amanda Morton is the Music Director. The concert will be at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N American St. Tickets cost $19-34 and are available online at www.11thhourtheatrecompany.org or by phone 267-987-9865.

The Next Step Concert Series is innovative, inspiring, and intimate. New and seldom seen musicals are stripped down to their very essence...good storytelling and incredible music. Broadcast takes us on a journey through the history of radio during the first half of the 20th century. This delightfully nostalgic, witty and emotion-filled chamber musical weaves its way through the lives of those who witnessed this technological evolution first-hand: telegraph operators, song-writers, scientists, pilots and more. But the radio itself is at the center of it all!

The idea for Broadcast originally struck Scott Murphy and Nathan Christensen in 2004 while they were grad students at NYU. A cast of eight plays thirty different characters, spanning many situations, locations and historical occurrences between 1901 and 1950. We see the effect this new wireless technology has on the their lives. The orchestration features a trio of string instruments (piano, guitar and violin) which provides a beautiful Americana folksy feel. Scott says, "The first sound has a lilt to it. It was the sound of the waves, the waves of the ocean and the waves of the sound, and that little accompaniment figure goes all the way through."

The cast of Broadcast includes: Luke Brahdt, Rachel Brennan, Elena Camp, Zachary Chiero, Marybeth Gorman, Larry Lees, Joseph Michael O'Brien, and Hudson Orfe.

Telling a story of newfound connectivity in this age of the world wide web and social media might sound a bit old-fashioned or irrelevant, but not so, according to Broadcast's director, Pacek. "We live in a world where I am constantly asking myself 'has technology gotten ahead of us?' I'm grateful for how it makes life better--information at our fingertips and being able to see and hear loved ones who are thousands of miles away. But those things also have a down-side. I fear that going to my 'instant gratification machine [aka smart phone] will one day render my brain obsolete. I worry that more 'FaceTime' will lead to less actual 'face-to-face' time. Technology has the amazing ability to connect us, but we're seeing more and more examples these days of how it's doing just the opposite. Broadcast takes a look at where it all began. The triumphs were there. The wonder - but also the challenges and pitfalls. It's good to remind ourselves where we've come from once in a while. Nathan Christensen has said that technology can be magic and overwhelming and terrifying...I couldn't agree more."

Pacek assisted director Joe Calarco (2012 Barrymore Award winner for Outstanding Direction of a Musical for 11th Hour's Ordinary Days) on a workshop presentation of Broadcast at Playwrights Horizons back in 2005. The show was also more recently workshopped at the National Music Theater Conference at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center in 2013.

Nathan Christensen received his BA in theatre studies from Brigham Young University in 2002. He earned his MFA from New York University's Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program in 2004, where he wrote Broadcast with Scott Murphy. His previous work includes Here In The Heartland (a Brechtian musical about the realities of small town life in America), Small Courage (an impressionistic portrait of Sir James Barrie, author of Peter Pan), The Battle Of Creek Cure (a dark comedy dealing with the bizarre health fads at the turn of the last century), and Cambices, King Of Persia (a verse adaptation of an Elizabethan play, integrating puppetry and live actors). He was the recipient of the Dramatists Guild's 2004 Jonathan Larson Musical Theatre Fellowship, and the 2005 Daryl Roth Award.

Scott Murphy received his BA in music composition in 2002 from Bennington College, where he studied with Ricky Ian Gordon. He earned his MFA in musical theatre writing from New York University in 2004. His work includes Shark In The Creek (book, music, and lyrics), Broadcast (music), and Phoebe (music). His song, I Miss Him, can be heard on Tom Bogdin's CD For Your Delight: New American Art Songs, and his song, My Perfect World, was performed by Brian D'Arcy James at the 2003 Children's Aid Society benefit concert. Scott has held internships at Manhattan Theatre Club and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. He received the Dramatists Guild's 2004 Jonathan Larson Musical Theatre Fellowship, and the 2005 Daryl Roth Award.

About 11th Hour Theatre Company

11th Hour Theatre Company is the only company in Philadelphia dedicated to producing all musicals, all the time. Intimate by design, 11th Hour creates a lasting experience with the audience by producing character-driven musical theatre.

11th Hour produces a broad spectrum of musicals that fill a niche in the diverse Philadelphia theatre landscape: musicals that spark the creativity of artists and the imaginations of audiences. Over the past eleven seasons, they have produced seventeen full-scale musicals, nine of which were Philadelphia premieres. In addition to the World Premiere of their first commission, Field Hockey Hot, the company has contributed to the development of several new musicals beginning with Angst, a ten-minute musical that premiered in the Spark Festival of 2005. 11th Hour produced the American premiere of Austentatious that went on to success at the New York Musical Theatre Festival; and a 29-hour reading of Fantasy Football, the Musical? before its production at New York University. Both Austentatious and Fantasy Football have since been published and are now professionally licensed. In the fall of 2014, 11th Hour partnered with University of the Arts to workshop Persephone Unplugged, a new twist on the classic Greek myth. With support from the Independence Foundation, 11th Hour recently commissioned their second musical from a local writing team, a Civil War-themed project currently titled Something Like a War.

11th Hour has received a total of forty-six Barrymore Award nominations. Their work has been recognized with eight awards, including two consecutive awards for "Outstanding Ensemble in a Musical" (The Bomb-itty of Errors, The World Goes 'Round), and several individual awards for their artists. Founding member Steve Pacek was also the proud recipient of the 2012 F. Otto Haas Award for an Emerging Philadelphia Theatre Artist. In 2013, 11th Hour became the first-ever recipient of the June and Steve Wolfson Award for an Evolving Theater.

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