All the shows listed below are musicals New Line Theatre is considering for future seasons. The links will take you to Amazon.com and the cast album, or to the show's webpage. E-mail us and let us know which shows you love and which you'd like to see. We're always interested in what our audiences think.

Avenue Q, the very adult, very funny, very smart exploration of twenty-somethings trying to find their place in the world, bumping up against all the modern American issues -- career, friendship, dating, sex, homosexuality, celebrity, the internet, education, public service, and so much more. But here's the cool part -- the entire story is told in the style and language of Sesame Street, with bouncy, catch tunes, and large friendly, furry puppets. This is a musical that understands that generation and tells its story in its own most familiar language. Unfortunately, the producer of the new Las Vegas production of the show has tied up the rights for 15 years...! (Check out the very funny benefit performance -- Avenue Q does Fiddler on the Roof...)
             

Big River, the very adult, very intense, truly powerful stage version of Huckleberry Finn, with a terrific score by pop songwriter Roger Miller, addressing quite intelligently and seriously racism and all the other issues of Mark Twain's ground-breaking novel. Go to a Big River webpage.

Evita, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's deliciously vicious political potboiler about Eva Peron, and her incredible rise to fame, fortune, and political power in 1940s Argentina, possibly the best score Rice and Webber ever wrote. Visit a nice fan site.

Faust, Randy Newman's pop/rock musical updating of the Faust legend is nasty, smart, sexy, and completely irreverent, painting God as a smug egotist, the Devil as just a hard-working guy who can't catch a break, and Faust as a slacker college kid who beats his girlfriend. The all-star concept album features James Taylor as God, Randy Newman as the Devil, Don Henley as Faust, plus a supporting cast including Bonnie Raitt, Linda Ronstadt, and Elton John. This show was put on stage a few years ago and it flopped because it was dumbed down and made "palatable." If they'd put the bite back in, it could be a masterpiece. Read a review and synopsis of the show, with audio clips or visit the Faust page on the Randy Newman website. Rights are currently not available for this show.

Follies, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman's legendary, award-winning masterpiece about living in the past, allowing the past to dominate the present, living in fantasy, being overwhelmed by regret, all through the lens of a reunion in 1971 of performers from the once great Weissman (read Ziegfeld) Follies, each of them getting to recreate one last time their Great Numbers from 1918 to 1943. The show focuses on two couples in particularly, both suffering damaged marriages and hopeless despair. As dark as its subject may be, this is a show that ultimately finds redemption in its characters' recognition of each of their own dangerous "follies." New Line plans to do this show, in partnership with one of the local orchestras, but not until we find an old proscenium theatre. This is not a show that belongs in a blackbox -- the audience has to experience the decay and ghosts of a real, old-fashioned theatre. If anybody has any ideas where to find one in the St. Louis area, email us....!

Grand Hotel, Tommy Tune's brilliant, thrilling concept musical based on the famous novel and film, set in the world famous Berlin hotel in 1928 as Germany teeters on the brink of Nazism. The show is a fascinating mix of minimalism and spectacle with its characters whirling through the revolving doors of the hotel as their stories dance in and out of the fabric of the show, including Elizaveta Grushinskaya, the aging Russian ballerina, Felix von Gaigern, the impoverished German nobleman, Otto Kringelein, the Jewish bookkeeper dying of cancer, and Flämmchen the pregnant typist who is desperate to make it to Hollywood.        
 

I Love My Wife is an intimate, unpretentious, romantic little four-character concept musical, a kind of sparkling jazz poem about love, sex, wife-swapping, and romance, all set to some of the best jazz music Broadway ever heard, with songs like "Married Couple Seeks Married Couple," "Sexually Free," "By Threes," and the unashamedly romantic "I Love My Wife." All with music by Cy Coleman, composer of Sweet Charity, City of Angels, and The Life..

Little Shop of Horrors, the fabulous, be-boppin' send-up of fifties horror films, all about a man-eating -- and rock singing -- Venus Flytrap, the nerd who sells his soul for love and success, the bleached blonde girl he loves, and the biker dentist she's dating. Based on the Faust legend and the 1960 low-budget Roger Corman movie. Visit a website.
 

Nine is the brilliantly funny, beautifully crafted psychological character study of a wildly adulterous Italian filmmaker having a midlife crisis in Venice, and all the women in his life (and there are a lot), based on Frederico Fellini's 1963 film masterpiece, 8 1/2 (we guess "8 1/2" doesn't rhyme well), originally directed on Broadway by Tommy Tune.

Pal Joey pretty much invented the anti-hero in American musical theatre, with Joey Evans, a user and a loser, and his adventures using and losing various women and jobs. He's a medicore nightclub singer at a mediocre nightclub in Chicago in 1940, but he's got big plans... One of the darkest musical comedies of the 20th century, Pal Joey was condemned in its original production as vulgar and crude and inappropriate for the Broadway stage. That's our kind of show.

Promenade is an utterly bizarre, utterly hilarious, absurdist musical about two escaped convicts who crash a party full of rich people, along the way stumbling into lots of modern issues about sexuality, social class, money, materialism, and lots more. It's the strangest musical you've ever encountered but it's lots of fun, with songs like "Four Naked Ladies," "The Cigarette Song," "Capricious and Fickle," "Chicken Is He," and lots more, equally odd. It just seems to scream "New Line!"

Promises, Promises, a smart, sexy, sad musical comedy based on the Billy Wilder film The Apartment, with a book by Neil Simon and a score by Burt Bacharach and Hal David. It tells the story of an ignored insurance executive, Chuck Baxter, who loans out his apartment to his bosses for their trysts in exchange for promotions, until the girl he loves tries to kill herself in his apartment because her married lover -- Chuck's boss -- has abandoned her on Chhristmas Eve. This is adult, serious musical comedy and the score is electrifying. 

Rent, the Hair for the 1990s, a pop opera about a group of artist friends in New York's East Village, in the midst of the AIDS pandemic. The show is loosely based on the opera La Boheme, and even more closely based on the hilarious novel, Scenes de la vie de boheme.  Read the script in a collection called The New American Musical. Go to the official website. Rights for this show are not yet available.

1776, the thrilling and surprisingly funny musical drama about the creation and signing of the Declaration of Independence, based largely on actual source material and historical fact with music and lyrics by Sherman Edwards, a history teacher (although he does take liberties here and there). It won the Best Musical Tony in 1969, beating out Hair. Visit a great website.

Sweet Charity, Bob Fosse's stylish and cynical musical about a dance hall girl trying to find Mr. Right, with a book by Neil Simon and a jazz-inspired score by Cy Coleman and Dorothy Fields, based on Fellini's 1957 film Nights of Cabiria. Visit a website.

Two Gentlemen of Verona, the funky, sexy, quirky, rock-jazz-Latin musical from Galt MacDermot, the composer of Hair, based on Shakespeare's cross-dressing comedy of the same name, transported to the multi-ethnic, sexually free New York of 1971, with great music and sparkling, adult humor. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

The Wild Party, the recent off-Broadway adaptation of the 1920s epic jazz age poem about the most decadent party anybody's ever thrown, set to a hot jazz score by Andrew Lippa, composer of john & jen and the new songs for the revival of You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown. Go to the website.