POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y.: Vassar College and New York Stage and Film have announced the 2016 Powerhouse Theater summer season, featuring full productions, workshop presentations, and staged readings of new plays and musicals at Vassar College. The season will run June 24–July 31.
The summer season will begin with a full production of Lucy Thurber’s Transfers (June 30–July 10). Jackson Gay will direct.
Next up will be a full production of The Wolves (July 21–July 31), by Sarah DeLappe, about nine American girls on an indoor soccer team. Lila Neugebauer will direct.
The musical workshop presentations will include a 12-hour marathon performance of material from Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music (July 30), a comprehensive chart of the history of music in America from 1776 to the present. Mac will co-direct with Niegel Smith.
The musical selections will also include Santino Fontana’s adaptation of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley’s The Roar of the Greasepaint, The Smell of the Crowd, about the lower and upper classes of British society in the 1960s. The project was commissioned by Roundabout Theatre Company, and Fontana will also star in the workshop.
The reading series will include Josh Radnor’s play Sacred Valley, and Lorien Haynes’s Good Grief, directed by John Slattery.
The Powerhouse Season will also provide an artistic residency for the new musical Head Over Heels, with book by Jeff Whitty, an Elizabethan love story inspired by Sir Philip Sidney’s 16th century romance Arcadia, set to the music of The Go-Go’s. Michael Mayer will direct, and Tom Kitt will provide musical supervision. Head Over Heels will not be presented to the public.
Members of the Powerhouse Theater training program, comprised of young actors, playwrights, and directors, will present Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Adapted and directed by Mark Lindberg, the story follows a high society woman living in London after World War I.
The training program, along with a faculty of artists, will also present Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, about a fortune seeker who attempts to win over a headstrong woman. Andrew Willis-Woodward will direct.
The Powerhouse Theater, a collaboration with Vassar College and New York Stage and Film, has been developing and presenting new work since 1985.
