PALO ALTO, CALIF.: TheatreWorks has announced its lineup for the 2015–16 season, featuring works developed by the company, a world premiere, several regional premieres and a number of Broadway hits.
The season begins with the world premiere of Triangle (July 8–Aug. 2), a new musical in which two love stories in the same New York apartment building 100 years apart come together when a scientist discovers the building was once home to the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire. With music by Curtis Moore, lyrics by Thomas Mizer and book by Moore, Mizer and Joshua Scher, Triangle was developed at TheatreWorks’ 2012 New Works Festival and has gone on to other developmental productions. Possibly seeding works for future seasons, this summer’s New Works Festival (August 7–16) will offer more playwrights and composers nationwide to present new work and attend discussions, view works-in-progress and have book-in-hand readings or sing-throughs of new musicals.
Next is the regional premiere of Donald Margulies’s Chekhovian The Country House (Aug. 26–Sept. 20). David Auburn’s Proof, which won the Pulitzer and Tony in 2001 and was for a time among the most-produced plays in America, is next (Oct. 7–Nov. 1).
Another TheatreWorks-nurtured show, composer/lyricist/librettist Paul Gordon’s adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma, will return as TheatreWorks’ holiday show, Dec. 2–27. The production, first developed by the theatre’s new works initiative in 2006, was the company’s 50th world premiere production in 2007.
Hershey Felder as Irving Berlin will be the first show of 2016, running Jan. 13–Feb. 6. Then comes Kimber Lee’s tokyo fish story (March 9–April 3), in which a sushi master struggles to preserve ancient artistry in a culture obsessed with change.
Edmund Rostand’s Cyrano (April 6–May 1), in a new adaptation by Michael Hollinger and Aaron Posner, is next. Closing out the season will be Eric Coble’s The Velocity of Autumn (June 1–26).
Since its founding in 1970, TheatreWorks has become one of the nation’s leaders in cultivating and producing new musicals and plays, developing and premiering more than 64 works by new and veteran artists and more than 150 regional premieres. The company has also developed scores of works which have gone on to both regional and Off-Broadway productions, one of which was the 2010 Tony Award-winning musical Memphis.
