|
ABOUT US Okay, can we be honest? Rodgers and Hammerstein are DEAD, for god's sake! Their last show was FIFTY years ago (and it wasn't even that good)! Can we please move on...? After all, as British director Peter Hall says, "What attracts audiences finally is new questions, not old answers." New Line Theatre, "The Bad Boy of Musical Theatre," was created in 1991 to involve the people of the St. Louis region in the creation and exploration of provocative, alternative, politically and socially relevant works of musical theatre daring, muscular, intelligent theatre about politics, race, violence, drugs, sexuality, religion, art, obscenity, the media, and other contemporary issues. And a lot of four-letter words. And every now and then, a little nudity. And lots of rock and roll.
And did we mention the four-letter words?
These are not your grandparents' musicals. New Line produces world premieres like Johnny Appleweed, She's Hideous, Love Kills, In the Blood, Attempting the Absurd, and The AmberKlavier; brilliant, lesser known Broadway and off Broadway shows like Bat Boy, High Fidelity, A New Brain, Return to the Forbidden Planet, The Wild Party, The Robber Bridegroom, Floyd Collins, The Nervous Set, and others; absurdist musicals like Reefer Madness, Urinetown, The Rocky Horror Show, The Cradle Will Rock, and Anyone Can Whistle; abstract musicals like Hair, Assassins, Jacques Brel, and Songs for a New World; concept musicals like Chicago, Sunday in the Park with George, and Cabaret; and radical reinterpretations of more mainstream works, like Man of La Mancha, Jesus Christ Superstar, Grease, Pippin, Sweeney Todd, and Into the Woods.
New Line Theatre was created just as the idea of nonprofit musical theatre was starting to take hold across the country. Miranda Lundskaer-Nielsen writes in her book Directors and the New Musical Drama, After the pioneering efforts of theatres such as the Public Theater and Playwrights Horizons in New York, the idea of the serious nonprofit musical spread to theatres across America during the 1990s. While these shows met with varying levels of economic and critical success, the very existence of this alternative home for the art form began to redefine the musical, offering an alternative to both the traditional Broadway musical and the new West End shows. As the economics of the commercial theatre became increasingly forbidding, the nonprofit theatre became vital incubators for musical drama and nurtured a new generation of musical theatre writers. New Line has given birth to several world premiere musicals over the years and has brought back to life many shows that did not do well in their original New York productions. New Line Theatre was recently given its own entry in the latest edition of the prestigious Cambridge Guide to American Theatre.
► Check out New Line's past shows and read artistic director Scott Miller's essay on musical theatre from his book Strike Up the Band: A New History of Musical Theatre.
Harry Hamm has said on KMOX-AM, Youre going to see really good, well done adult theatre at New Line that nobody else really attempts here in St. Louis. Judith Newmark, of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, says This is musical theatre for audiences who think that musical theatre can't be hip. The Beacon says, Yes, New Line Theatre produces musicals, but these have an edge, a swagger. They are fierce. Mark Bretz of The Ladue News says, New Line Theatre is all about presentations that are daring, different or deliciously skewering the conventional. Joe Pollack of KWMU-FM says, When it comes to challenging St. Louis theater audiences, to stretching them, exposing them to new stimuli, hardly anyone is in a class with New Line Theatre.
SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD New Line Theatre takes its musicals seriously. The New Liners believe in what Broadway and film actor Laurence Luckinbill once wrote in a letter to artistic director Scott Miller: Go broke if you must, but always over-estimate the publics intelligence. They will thank you for it. We think our job is to surprise you, to bring you a new adventure every time you walk into our theatre. We agree with the fictional artistic director on Slings and Arrows: "The theatre is an empty box and it is our job to fill it with fury and ecstasy and revolution."
We believe live theatre is one of the most powerful tools in the world for social and political change, and we believe we have an obligation to use that tool to make the world a better place, to engage the people of our region in a discussion about the issues of our times. Acting guru Stella Adler once said, "Unless you give the audience something that makes them bigger better do not act." Actor Ben Kingsley has said about actors, "The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you." Way back in 1962, Broadway composer Jerry Bock (Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, She Loves Me) predicted something which is only now finally happening: Shortly it will happen. The American musical will shed its present polished state and become an untidy, adventurous something else. Shortly it will exchange its current neatness and professional grooming for a less manicured appearance, for a more peculiar profile. It will swell beyond or shrink from the finesse that regulates it now. It will poke around. It will hunt for. It will wander and wonder. It will try and trip. But at least it will be moving again, off the treadmill, out of the safety zone, crossing not at the green, but in between..."
MUCH MORE In addition to our work onstage, New Line also serves our community in so many other ways, including the administration of the original St. Louis Theatre Discussion Group (created by New Line in 1999, with over 750 local members); the creation of the first two St. Louis Theatre Racial Diversity Symposiums; the creation of the St. Louis Political Theatre Festival; New Line Theatre's intern program; New Line's Cultural Partners program; and the co-founding of the St. Louis Professional Theatre Cooperative. New Line also makes available free seats to every mainstage performance, open to any college student with a valid student ID. The company recently created a web portal just for college students, The New Line College Commons. The New Liners are fully committed not just to producing quality theatre, but also to serving St. Louis metro area audiences through our work.
WEB 2.0 New Line continues to embrace new technologies and cultural trends, and we've made a real commitment to exploring the possibilities of Web 2.0, the new generation of websites designed specifically for interaction. We want to enhance the theatre-going experience for our audiences, but also to extend that experience beyond the physical theatre, so that our audiences can interact with the artists who make the shows. So we're creating blogs and viral videos for each show and we maintain an active presence on Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other platforms. New Line also provides incredible resources on our own full-service website, including research materials about shows we produce; background and analysis essays about shows (both on our website and in the lobby during performances); research materials on musical theatre as an art form; the promotion of other local theatre companies through comprehensive lists of St. Louis theatres and upcoming local musicals, and much, much more. See everything on our site by visiting our Site Map.
The artists of New Line honor our past and the Rodgers and Hammerstein school of musical theatre but believe that after more than sixty years of that model, it's time to move forward and explore new models and new paths. So, while working entirely within the musical theatre genre, New Line explores and experiments with audience expectations, the relationship between actor and audience, the uses of physical space, the uses of music, and the distortion or rejection of traditional linear storytelling, plot, and structure.
In 2010, President Obama hosted an evening of Broadway music at the White House, and he said, "In many ways, the story of Broadway is intertwined with the story if America. Some of the greatest singers and songwriters Broadway has ever known came to this country on a boat with nothing more than an idea in their head and a song in their heart. And they succeeded the same way that so many immigrants have succeeded -- through talent and hard work and sheer determination. Over the years, musicals have been at the forefront of our social consciousness, challenging stereotypes, shaping our opinions about race and religion, death and disease, power and politics." (Read his full remarks here.)
This art form of ours has never been more adventurous or more vigorous, and the New Liners are determined to be a part of that excitement. (Check out this great New York Times story about the new generation of musical theatre lovers.) The musical theatre is one of our very few indigenous American art forms, one of America's greatest gifts to the world, full of the raw power of the American experience, and New Line treats it with the seriousness, respect, humor, and joy that it deserves.
Click here to read even more about New Line's philosophy, its models, its process, its goals... |
Bock
