The New Group 2016 – 2017 Season Announced

The New Group, led by founding Artistic Director Scott Elliott and Executive Director Adam Bernstein, is an award-winning, artist-driven company with a commitment to developing and producing powerful, contemporary theatre. While constantly evolving, we strive to maintain an ensemble approach to all our work and an articulated style of emotional immediacy in our acting and productions. In this way, we seek a theatre that is adventurous, stimulating and most importantly “now”, a true forum for the present culture.

Sweet Charity – 50th Anniversary Revival

Featuring Sutton Foster Nov – Dec 2016

Sweet Charity is a musical with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and book by Neil Simon. It was directed and choreographed for Broadway by Bob Fosse starring his wife and muse Gwen Verdon alongside John McMartin. It is based on Federico Fellini’s screenplay for Nights of Cabiria. However, where Fellini’s black-and-white Italian film concerns the romantic ups-and-downs of an ever-hopeful sex worker, in the musical the central character is a dancer-for-hire at a Times Square dance hall. The musical premiered on Broadway in 1966, where it was nominated for 9 Tony Awards, and also ran in the West End as well as having revivals and international productions.

Timed to the 50th Anniversary of the classic musical Sweet Charity, this production stars two-time Tony Award winner Sutton Foster (“Younger,” Violet, Anything Goes) as Charity Hope Valentine, the sassy, diehard romantic dancehall hostess whose naivety and overeager embrace of every man she meets keeps getting her in hot water.  Performed in an intimate setting with original choreography by Joshua Bergasse (On the Town), this production of Sweet Charity will be given a fresh, modern perspective by tony nominated director Leigh Silverman (Violet, Well).

 

Joshua Bergasse	Leigh Silverman	Sutton Foster

Sweet Charity is presented by The New Group in association with Kevin McCollum

 

Book by Neil Simon, Music by Cy Coleman, Lyrics by Dorothy Fields,

Choreography by Joshua Bergasse

Directed by Leigh Silverman

 

Evening at the Talk House

by Wallace Shawn

January – March 2017

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the opening of a flop play, the playwright joins the old gang to reminisce at their former haunt, The Talk House.  Most haven’t been there, or even seen each other, in years, and the gossip and nostalgia are mixed with questions and accusations.  Why does a washed-up old actor keep getting beaten up by his friends?  Where does a failed actress-turned-waitress disappear to for months at a time?  Wallace Shawn’s Evening at the Talk House is a biting, yet affectionate skewering of artists grasping to find their place in a world in which art has no currency and terror has become an accepted part of life.

 

 

Wallace Shawn	Scott Elliott

 

All the Fine Boys

By Erica Schmidt

February – March 2017

It’s suburban South Carolina in the late ’80s and fourteen year-old best friends Jenny and Emily are ready to make their first serious attempts with boys.  Emily chooses her senior crush from the high school play, and Jenny a man she’s seen at her family’s church.  With parallel stories that take tricky and terrifying turns, All the Fine Boys dives deep into the fascinations and fears of sexual awakening and the first painful gasps of maturity.

Directed by Erica Schidt

 

The Whirligig

by Hamish Linklater

May – June 2017

When, after much time away, Kristina (Maura Tierney) is back in Berkshire County, word spreads fast that she and her ex-husband are caring for their estranged, ailing daughter Julie.  Broken-hearted and giddy with love and confusion, surprising visitors from Julie’s complicated past, including her childhood best friend Trish (Zosia Mamet) and her former drug dealer, practically trip over each other to reach the young woman they thought they’d lost years before but still feel so deeply connected to.  Heartfelt and compassionate, Hamish Linklater’s The Whirligig spins a tale of a fractured community weaving a circuitous route back to one another.

 

Hamish Linklater	Scott Elliott	Zosia Mamet	Maura Tierney

 

The New Group

The New Group, led by founding Artistic Director Scott Elliott and Executive Director Adam Bernstein, is an award-winning, artist-driven company with a commitment to developing and producing powerful, contemporary theater. While constantly evolving, we strive to maintain an ensemble approach to all our work and an articulated style of emotional immediacy in our acting and productions. In this way, we seek a theater that is adventurous, stimulating and most importantly “now”, a true forum for the present culture.

Founded in 1995, The New Group was born of Artistic Director Scott Elliott’s desire to develop a place for artists to experiment, take risks, and learn from each other without the pressures of commercial theatre. Notable productions include Ecstasy, This is Our Youth, Aunt Dan and Lemon, Hurlyburly, Abigail’s Party, Rafta, Rafta…, The Starry Messenger, A Lie of the Mind, Blood From a Stone, Marie and Bruce, The Jacksonian, Sticks and Bones, The Spoils, Steve and Buried Child. In over twenty years, we have received nearly 100 awards and nominations for excellence. The New Group’s first musical, Avenue Q, won three Tony Awards. Most recently, The Kid received the Outer Critics Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Musical, and The New Group and Scott Elliott were honoured with a 2010-2011 Drama Desk Special Award “for presenting contemporary new voices, and for uncompromisingly raw and powerful productions.”

In addition, the organization’s New Group/New Works play and musical development program champions original works by emerging and established authors. The New Group also operates a variety of theatre education programs that provide opportunities for artistically inclined high school, college, and adult students.

 

The New Group Official WebSite HERE