|
ABOUT US
SONGS FOR A NEW WORLD Way back in 1962, Broadway composer Jerry Bock (Fiddler on the Roof, Fiorello!, She Loves Me) wrote, “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... The new musical may not take place between 41st and 54th street east or west of Broadway. That is, not at first. It may start in San Francisco or Chicago or Minneapolis. Or Lincoln Center. It may come from London or Paris or Rome or Johannesburg. Or the Village. It will probably be viewed and noted with greater interest. We will be less provincial about protecting the American-Broadway-musical-image. We will eliminate the high tariff against vigorous ideas not coming from The Street. We will join the common market of the theatrical world. Our eyes will stray, our ears will sharpen. And what we see and hear from everywhere will prepare us, will help us make our own new statement. Broadway may become one of many alternatives. It may, along with the musical, change its spots. And we may desert it now and then in search of something else. It won’t mesmerize as much. Nor will it strangle. Its monopoly days are numbered. Nothing more exciting in the theatre will happen than this new musical.”
New Line produces world premieres like Johnny Appleweed, Woman with Pocketbook, She's Hideous, In the Blood, Attempting the Absurd, and The AmberKlavier; brilliant, lesser known Broadway and off Broadway shows like Floyd Collins, A New Brain, High Fidelity, March of the Falsettos, Passion, The Robber Bridegroom, The Nervous Set, and Bat Boy; abstract musicals like Hair, Assassins, Jacques Brel, and Songs for a New World; absurdist musicals like Reefer Madness, Urinetown, Attempting the Absurd, The Cradle Will Rock, and Anyone Can Whistle; concept musicals like Company, Chicago, Sunday in the Park with George, and Cabaret; and radical reinterpretations of more mainstream works, like Man of La Mancha, Camelot, Jesus Christ Superstar, Pippin, Sweeney Todd, Grease, and Into the Woods.
Peter Filichia, Broadway critic, called his trip to St. Louis to see New Line's
The Nervous Set “the
most valuable theatrical pilgrimage I've ever made.”
In 2004, St.
Louis Magazine's Best of St. Louis “A List”
named New Line the best theatre in St. Louis,
writing, “
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 700 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 New Liners are fully committed not just to producing quality theatre, but also to serving St. Louis metro area audiences through our work.
New Line continues to embrace new technologies and cultural trends, with our blogs and viral videos for each show and our presence on MySpace, Facebook, and Wikipedia, among other things. New Line also provides incredible resources on our full-service website, including research materials about every show we produce; background and analysis essays about each show (both on our website and in the lobby during performances); the promotion of other local theatre companies through comprehensive lists of St. Louis theatres and upcoming local musicals, and much more.
We believe in what Theodore Roosevelt once said: "It is not the critic who counts, nor the man who points out where the strong man stumbled, or where the doers of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who in the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those timid souls who knew neither victory or defeat." The artists of New Line honor 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.
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... |
TAKING A CHANCE ON LOVE
