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New Line Announcs 27th Season of Musical Theatre

By: Jun. 14, 2017
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New Line Theatre, "the bad boy of musical theatre," announces its 27th season of adult, alternative musical theatre, including the St. Louis premiere of the four-woman rock opera LIZZIE, a very different take on the Lizzie Borden legend, running Sept. 28-Oct. 21, 2017; followed by Cole Porter's satiric masterpiece ANYTHING GOES, running March 1-24, 2018; and the St. Louis premiere of the world's first bio-historical musical comedy, YEAST NATION, written by the Urinetown team, running May 31-June 23, 2018. All New Line's mainstage shows will be in the company's home, the Marcelle Theater, in Grand Center, St. Louis' arts district.

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The season will also include two Special Events. New Line will present a reading of the new/old musical THE ZOMBIES OF PENZANCE, "Gilbert & Sullivan's original operatic abomination," free and open to the public, in January 2018, exact date still to be announced. New Line will also present a reading of another new musical later in 2018, details to be announced later.

New Line continues its partnership with the Webster University Department of Music and their Bachelor of Music in Music Direction for Musical Theatre degree program. Jeffrey Richard Carter is chair of the department and also resident music director for New Line.

LIZZIE

It's a sweltering August in 1892, in Fall River, Massachusetts. A prominent businessman and his wife are brutally axed to death in their home. Their daughter Lizzie Borden is the prime suspect. Lizzie's trial is a coast-to-coast media sensation, and her story becomes an American legend.

Lizzie is ferocious, powerful musical theatre as rock concert, four women and a six-piece rock band, chock full of rage, sex, betrayal, and bloody murder, an American mythology set to a blistering rock score, a radically new American musical with a sound owing less to Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber than to Bikini Kill, the Runaways, and Heart. The show has music by Steven Cheslik-DeMeyer and Alan Stevens Hewitt, lyrics by Cheslik-DeMeyer and Tim Maner, book and additional music by Maner, and additional lyrics by Hewitt.

The New York Times called the show "a gothic rock ritual with a 'riotgirl' attitude ... an eerie hybrid of rock club and a turn-of-the-century New England parlor. . . Presented with wall-rattling glee...deliciously watchable." The Village Voice talked about the show's "lush tunes which retch sex, rage, heat, misanthropy, and incest ... Surreal glee and gallows humor ... Finally, a rock musical you'd wanna mosh to." TimeOutNY called it "a fetching, brawny rock musical." And Show Business Weekly said, "We came for splattered red, for madness and mayhem, and Lizzie more than delivers."

The cast of New Line's Lizzie will include Anna Skidis as Lizzie, with Kimi Short, Larissa White, and Marcy Wiegert. The show will be directed by Mike Dowdy-Windsor, with music direction by Sarah Nelson, scenic and lighting design by Rob Lippert, costumes by Sarah Porter, and sound design by Elli Castonguay.

Lizzie contains adult language and content.

ANYTHING GOES

New Line continues its 27th season with the rowdy, naughty, subversive masterpiece of musical comedy, Cole Porter's Anything Goes, the stinging satire of Americans' quirky habit of turning religion into show business and criminals into celebrities, along the way skewering Wall Street, Prohibition, the Brits, and several other ripe targets.

First opening in a time when John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, Al Capone, and evangelists Aimee Semple McPherson and Billy Sunday were all national celebrities, this was potent, pointed satire; and it's just as potent today. The show's evangelist turned nightclub singer Reno Sweeney is equal parts McPherson and speakeasy hostess Texas Guinan (the model for Velma Kelly in Chicago). And though we never meet gangster Snake Eyes Johnson, he's seems a fair double for Dillinger. But they all have their modern-day equivalents too.

Despite its reputation as old-school fluff, Anything Goes is a smart satire of American "cafe society" (the 1% of 1934), with the steamship S.S. American standing in for Shakespeare's woods, a place with no rules, where people find out who they really are and "correct" the mistakes they've made in the world of the City.

Artistic director Scott Miller says, "It never occurred to me until I was writing my musical theatre history book (Strike Up the Band) that the two main themes of Anything Goes are as New Liney as they could be, the commercializing of religion into show business - isn't that what TV mega-churches are? - and the raising up of violent criminals into pop culture celebrities. Can we be sure that Reno Sweeney is any less authentic than Pat Robertson or Joel Osteen?"

New Line has chosen the 1962 version of the show (there are several versions), with a book by Guy Bolton, P.G. Wodehouse, Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, and additional songs from several other Porter musicals. The New Liners will return to the wildness and the high-energy subversion of the original production. Miller has been studying the show for some time, including the original 1934 script (which probably couldn't be produced today). Miller says, "Over time, the show has been worn down into a quaint, family-friendly piece of sketch comedy. I want to return it to its original, satiric, adult roots."

The show will be directed by Scott Miller and Mike Dowdy-Windsor, with music direction by Jeffrey Richard Carter, scenic and lighting design by Rob Lippert, costumes by Sarah Porter, and sound design by Elli Castonguay.

YEAST NATION

The world's first bio-historical musical comedy, from the mad geniuses who brought us Urinetown!

It's the year 3,000,458,000 BC. The Earth's surface is a molten mass of Volcanic Islands and undulating waves. The atmosphere is a choking fog lit by a dim red sun. And the mighty waters of the world are inhabited only by rocks, sand, salt, more rocks, a little silt, and the great society of salt-eating yeasts - yes, yeasts! - the worlds very first life form!

These single-cell salt-eaters are the only living creatures on earth, and they're up against a food shortage, a strange new emotion called Love, and the oppression of a tyrannical yeast king. But when the king's son ventures out of the known yeastiverse, the yeasts' story - and ours - is changed forever.

The New York Times, said, "This is the rare satire that knows exactly what it's doing and commits to it." Variety wrote, "Ostensibly, it's about the world's earliest life forms, but it's really a riff on individual human aspiration, love, and theatrical storytelling. While it's an easily recognizable sibling to Urinetown, this show possesses enough uniqueness and consistent cleverness to forge its own path."

With a book by Greg Kotis, and music and lyrics by Mark Hollmann and Kotis, Yeast Nation has been produced four times so far, at the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, in 2007; at the American Theater Company in Chicago in 2009; at the New York International Fringe Festival in 2011; and at the Ray of Light Theatre in San Francisco in 2014. The team has continued working on the show.

Artistic director Scott Miller saw Urinetown in November 2001, right after it moved to Broadway. He says, "It blew my mind. From the very first song, I felt like someone had written a musical just for me." New Line produced Urinetown in 2007. Miller says, "As soon as I read the Yeast Nation script and heard the songs, I knew we had to work on this. It's going to be crazy amounts of fun."

The show will be directed by Scott Miller and Mike Dowdy-Windsor, with scenic and lighting design by Rob Lippert, costumes by Sarah Porter, and sound design by Elli Castonguay.

THE ZOMBIES OF PENZANCE
A Public Reading

Gilbert & Sullivan's long-lost, original "operatic abomination," in its wacky world premiere!

New Line Theatre, "the bad boy of musical theatre," has shocked the music world by discovering a long-lost first draft by the legendary British team of librettist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan, who together wrote fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896.

One of the team's best known works, The Pirates of Penzance, originally debuted in New York in 1879, and was revived to great success in the early 1980s with Kevin Kline, Linda Ronstadt, and Rex Smith. What we now know is that there was an earlier, stranger draft of the show, which nobody knew about until now, with most of the same characters but a somewhat different plot.

In Gilbert & Sullivan's never-before seen original draft, titled The Zombies of Penzance (with the unwieldy subtitle, At Night Come the Flesh Eaters), Major-General Stanley is a retired zombie hunter, who doesn't want his daughters marrying the dreaded Zombies of Penzance (for obvious reasons). According to documents found with the manuscripts, Gilbert and Sullivan finished work on The Zombies of Penzance in mid-1878, but their producer Richard D'Oyly-Carte refused to produce it, calling it vulgar, impolitic, and unchristian, and in one letter, "an operatic abomination, an obscene foray into the darkest of the occult arts." In a letter to his cousin, Gilbert expressed his deep disappointment, writing "I fear the walking dead shall be the end of me yet."

Until now, music scholars had been baffled by that reference.

After a battle that almost ended the partnership, the team reluctantly agreed to rewrite their show, and in 1879, D'Oyly-Carte debuted the much more conventional, revised version, The Pirates of Penzance, which added the characters of Ruth and the policemen, and eliminated all references to zombism.

In 2013, New Line artistic director Scott Miller discovered the original manuscripts for The Zombies of Penzance in the second sub-basement of the Judson Memorial Church in New York, hidden beneath some moldy band parts from Rockabye Hamlet and Shogun the Musical, and Miller set about reconstructing the bizarre original show as G&S intended. Gilbert's walking dead and their Zombie King now make their long-delayed world premiere. Miller has painstakingly reassembled these rediscovered materials into their original form, filling in the gaps with educated guesses based on other G&S shows and drafts. St. Louis composer and orchestrator John Gerdes is reconstructing Sullivan's music.

Now, for the first time, audiences will be able to see and hear the comic, flesh-eating insanity Gilbert & Sullivan originally wrought. New Line will host a free public reading of The Zombies of Penzance in January 2018, and then produce the show fully in October 2018, to open New Line's 28th season. The reading will be directed by Scott Miller, with music direction by Sarah Nelson.

Season tickets and single tickets for the 2017-2018 season will go on sale in August. All mainstage shows run Thursday, Friday, and Saturday evenings, at 8:00 p.m., at the Marcelle Theater, 3310 Samuel Shepard Drive, just three blocks east of Grand, in Grand Center. (See our website for directions.) The first Thursday of each run is a preview. Tickets for mainstage shows are $25 for adults and $20 for students/seniors on Fridays and Saturdays; and $20 for adults and $15 for students/seniors on Thursdays.

For other information, visit New Line Theatre's full-service website at www.newlinetheatre.com. All programs are subject to change.

ABOUT NEW LINE THEATRE

New Line Theatre is a professional company dedicated to involving the people of the St. Louis region in the exploration and creation of daring, provocative, socially and politically relevant works of musical theatre. New Line was created back in 1991 at the vanguard of a new wave of nonprofit musical theatre just starting to take hold across the country. New Line has given birth to several world premiere musicals over the years and has brought back to life several shows that were not well served by their original New York productions. Altogether, New Line has produced 81 musicals since 1991, and the company has been given its own entry in the Cambridge Guide to American Theatre and the annual Theater World. New Line receives funding from the Regional Arts Commission and the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency.

New Line's current season continues with The Sweet Smell of Success, running through June 24; and Out on Broadway: The Third Coming, running August 3-19. For more information, visit www.newlinetheatre.com.

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