Encores! is a Tony-honored concert series dedicated to reviving American musicals, usually with their original orchestrations. [1] Presented by New York City Center since 1994, Encores! has revived shows by Irving Berlin, Rodgers & Hart, George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim, among many others. Encores! was the brainchild of Judith Daykin, who launched the series shortly after becoming Executive Director of City Center in 1992. [2] [3] Besides initiating Encores!, Daykin is credited for turning City Center from a rental hall into a presenting organization. [4] The series has spawned nineteen cast recordings and numerous Broadway transfers, including Kander and Ebb's Chicago , which is now the second longest-running musical in Broadway history. [5] Videotapes of many Encores! productions are collected at the Billy Rose Theater Collection of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. The series was led by artistic director Jack Viertel from 2001 to 2020; in October 2019, City Center announced that Lear deBessonet will take over as artistic director beginning with the 2021 Encores! season. [6]
From 2000 to 2001, City Center presented a short-lived sister series, Voices!, devoted to staged readings of infrequently-produced American plays and produced by Alec Baldwin. From 2007 to 2009, the spin-off series Encores! Summer Stars featured fully-staged productions of classic Broadway musicals, beginning with a production of Gypsy starring Patti LuPone, Boyd Gaines, and Laura Benanti. Gypsy received unprecedented attention for an Encores! show and eventually transferred to Broadway; LuPone, Gaines, and Benanti all won Tony Awards for their performances.
In 2013, City Center launched Encores! Off-Center!, a sister series devoted to groundbreaking Off-Broadway musicals. Led by founding artistic director Jeanine Tesori for its first four seasons, [7] Encores! Off-Center was subsequently led by Michael Friedman (2017), Tesori and Anne Kauffman (2018), and Kauffman (2019–present). [8] [9]
Two Encores! productions scheduled for the spring of 2020 were canceled due to COVID-19. Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner's 1948 musical Love Life was to have starred Kate Baldwin and Brian Stokes Mitchell; a revised version of Jeanine Tesori and Dick Scanlan's 2002 musical Thoroughly Modern Millie was to have starred Ashley Park.
Title | Playwright | Year | Voices! Run | Stars | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Arsenic and Old Lace | Joseph Kesselring | 1941 | November 11, 2000 | Alec Baldwin, Celeste Holm, Joanne Woodward |
2 | Little Murders | Jules Feiffer | 1967 | January 30, 2001 | Blythe Danner, Jules Feiffer, Christopher Fitzgerald, Joel Grey |
3 | The Devil and Daniel Webster | Stephen Vincent Benét | 1939 | March 13, 2001 | Eric Bogosian, James Naughton |
Title | Music | Lyrics | Book | Year | Encores! Summer Stars Run | Stars | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Gypsy | Jule Styne | Stephen Sondheim | Arthur Laurents | 1959 | July 9–29, 2007 BWAY | Laura Benanti, Alison Fraser, Boyd Gaines, Leigh Ann Larkin, Patti LuPone, Nancy Opel, Tony Yazbeck |
2 | Damn Yankees | Richard Adler and Jerry Ross | George Abbott and Douglass Wallop | 1955 | July 5–27, 2008 | Randy Graff, Sean Hayes, Cheyenne Jackson, Jane Krakowski, Megan Lawrence, Michael Mulheren | |
3 | The Wiz | Charlie Smalls | William F. Brown | 1975 | June 12 – July 5, 2009 | Tichina Arnold, Ashanti, Joshua Henry, James Monroe Iglehart, Orlando Jones, LaChanze, Dawnn Lewis |
Notes
Gypsy: A Musical Fable is a musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. It is loosely based on the 1957 memoirs of striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, and focuses on her mother, Rose, whose name has become synonymous with "the ultimate show business mother." It follows the dreams and efforts of Rose to raise two daughters to perform onstage and casts an affectionate eye on the hardships of show business life. The character of Louise is based on Lee, and the character of June is based on Lee's sister, the actress June Havoc.
Patti Ann LuPone is an American actress and singer best known for her work in musical theater. After starting her professional career with The Acting Company in 1972 she soon gained acclaim for her leading performances on the Broadway and West End stage. She has won three Tony Awards, two Olivier Awards, and two Grammy Awards, and was a 2006 inductee to the American Theater Hall of Fame.
Playwrights Horizons is a not-for-profit American Off-Broadway theater located in New York City dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers, and lyricists, and to the production of their new work.
Jeanine Tesori, known earlier in her career as Jeanine Levenson, is an American composer and musical arranger best known for her work in the theater. She is the most prolific and honored female theatrical composer in history, with five Broadway musicals and six Tony Award nominations. She won the 1999 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music in a Play for Nicholas Hytner's production of Twelfth Night at Lincoln Center, the 2004 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Music for Caroline, or Change, the 2015 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Fun Home, making them the first female writing team to win that award, and the 2023 Tony Award for Best Original Score for Kimberly Akimbo. She was named a Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist twice for Fun Home and Soft Power.
Victoria Clark is an American actress, musical theatre singer and director. Clark has performed in numerous Broadway musicals and in other theatre, film and television works. Her soprano voice can also be heard on various cast albums and several animated films. In 2008, she released her first solo album titled Fifteen Seconds of Grace. A five-time Tony Award nominee, Clark won her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical in 2005 for her performance in The Light in the Piazza. She also won the Drama Desk Award, Outer Critics Circle Award, and the Joseph Jefferson Award for the role. She won a second Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical in 2023 for her performance in Kimberly Akimbo.
Runaways is a musical which was written, composed, choreographed and directed by Elizabeth Swados, about the lives of children who run away from home and live on the city streets. The characters were taken from workshops conducted by Swados with real-life runaways in the late 1970s.
The Drama League Awards, created in 1922, honor distinguished productions and performances both on Broadway and Off-Broadway, in addition to recognizing exemplary career achievements in theatre, musical theatre, and directing. Each May, the awards are presented by The Drama League at the Annual Awards Luncheon with performers, directors, producers, and Drama League members in attendance. The Drama League membership comprises the entire theater community, including award-winning actors, designers, directors, playwrights, producers, industry veterans, critics and theater-going audiences from across the U.S.
Dick Scanlan is an American writer, director, and actor.
Gary Griffin is an American theater director.
Laura Ilene Benanti is an American actress and singer. Over the course of her Broadway career, she has received five Tony Award nominations. She played Louise in the 2008 Broadway revival of Gypsy, winning the 2008 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. Benanti then appeared in the Broadway musical Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown in 2010, winning the Drama Desk Award and Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical. She played Elsa Schräder in the 2013 NBC television production of The Sound of Music Live! and, in 2015, began playing Supergirl's twin mother and aunt Alura and Astra in the TV series Supergirl. Benanti appeared as Edie Randall in the TBS comedy The Detour from 2017 until the show's cancellation in 2019. Since 2016, she has had a recurring role as First Lady Melania Trump on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Lonny Price is an American director, actor, and writer, primarily in theatre. He is best known for his New York directing work, including Sunset Boulevard, Sweeney Todd, Company, and Sondheim! The Birthday Concert. As an actor, he is perhaps best known for his creation of the role of Charley Kringas in the Broadway musical Merrily We Roll Along, Neil Kellerman in Dirty Dancing, and Ronnie Crawford in The Muppets Take Manhattan.
Jessica Rush is an American actress and singer. She won the Joseph Jefferson Award in 2014 for her performance in Gypsy at the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.
Gordon Greenberg is an American stage director, a theater and television writer, and an Artistic Associate at The New Group.
New York City Center is a performing arts center at 131 West 55th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Developed by the Shriners between 1922 and 1924 as a Masonic meeting house, it has operated as a performing arts complex owned by the government of New York City. City Center is a performing home for several major dance companies as well as the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC), and it hosts the Encores! musical theater series and the Fall for Dance Festival annually.
Anne Kauffman is an American director known primarily for her work on new plays, mainly in the New York area. She is a founding member of the theater group the Civilians. She made her Broadway debut with the Scott McPherson play Marvin's Room (2017) and returned with the revival of the Lorraine Hansberry play The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (2023).
54 Below is a nonprofit cabaret and restaurant in the basement of Studio 54 in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Run by Broadway producers Steve Baruch, Richard Frankel, Marc Routh and Tom Viertel, 54 Below has hosted shows by such performers as Patti LuPone, Ben Vereen, Sierra Boggess, Peggy King, Lea Salonga, Marilyn Maye, Luann de Lesseps and Barbara Cook.
Fun Home is a musical theatre adaptation of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic memoir of the same name, with music by Jeanine Tesori, and book and lyrics by Lisa Kron. The story concerns Bechdel's discovery of her own lesbian sexuality, her relationship with her closeted gay father, and her attempts to unlock the mysteries surrounding his life. It is told in a series of non-linear vignettes connected by narration provided by the adult Alison character.
After Midnight is a Broadway musical that premiered at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre in 2013. The revue is based on an earlier 2011 revue, titled Cotton Club Parade, which ran in concert at Encores! in 2011 and 2012.
Michael Rafter is an American arranger, musical director, musical supervisor, conductor, and musician best known for his work on Broadway and collaborations with Sutton Foster. He was Musical Director for the 2014 Broadway revival of Violet.
Sam Gold is an American theater director and actor. Having studied at Cornell University and Juilliard School he became known for directing both musicals and plays, on Broadway and Off-Broadway. He has received Tony Award and nominations for three Drama Desk Awards.