Cast and Creative Announcement

WaterTower Theatre Announces the Cast and Creative Team for the remainder of the
2017 - 2018 Main Stage Season

Addison (TX)… WaterTower Theatre Artistic Director, Joanie Schultz, today announced casting and creative team details for the remainder of the 2017-2018 Main Stage Season, which includes the Regional Premiere of Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue by Quiara Alegría Hudes, Bread, a World Premiere by Regina Taylor, The Last Five Years by Jason Robert Brown, and the Regional Premiere of Hand to God by Robert Askins. The directors for the remainder of the Season include David Lozano, Leah C. Gardiner, Kelsey Leigh Ervi, and Joanie Schultz.

Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue

Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist Quiara Alegría Hudes takes a poignant look at the way war permeates young men’s lives in a play spanning three generations of the same Puerto Rican-American family. Elliot is a Marine Corps hero back from Iraq with an injured leg and a Purple Heart. His Pop was wounded in Vietnam; his flute-playing Grandpop fought in Korea. In a fugue-like form, different wars and different tales are strung together as Ginny, his mother, seeks to reconcile the disparate parts and heal emotional wounds. Hudes’ spare, intense, and poetically resonant play speaks to the personal cost of war across the ages

About the Director

DAVID LOZANO, Director
David serves as the Executive Artistic Director of Cara Mía Theatre and specializes in writing, directing and producing bilingual plays. Notable writing credits include Crystal City 1969 (co-written with Raul Treviño), Nuestra Pastorela (co-written with Jeffry Farrell), To DIE:GO in Leaves by Frida Kahlo, The Dreamers: A Bloodline, and Cholos y Chulas (all devised with Cara Mía Theatre). Recently, Lozano co-wrote Deferred Action for a Cara Mía Theatre and Dallas Theater Center co-production at the Wyly Theatre. Last fall, Deferred Action toured through Texas and performed at the Encuentro de las Americas international theatre festival in Los Angeles. Directing credits include Deferred Action, Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca, Lydia by Octavio Solis, The Magic Rainforest by José Cruz Gonzalez (with Jeffrey Colangelo), a bilingual Romeo and Julieta by William Shakespeare and adapted by Lozano and Frida Espinosa Müller, The Dreamers: A Bloodline by Cara Mía Theatre’s ensemble, Milagritos by Sandra Cisneros and adapted by Marisela Barrera, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros and adapted by Amy Ludwig, and Crystal City 1969. Lozano is proud to return to WaterTower Theatre after directing Native Gardens last spring.

About the Playwright

QUIARA ALEGRIA HUDES, Playwright
Quiara Alegría Hudes is the author of a trilogy of plays including Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue (2006), Water by the Spoonful (2011), and The Happiest Song Plays Last (2012). Elliot, A Soldier’s Fugue premiered Off-Off Broadway by Page 73 Productions and was a finalist for the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Water by the Spoonful premiered at Hartford Stage Company and won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. The Happiest Song Plays Last premiered at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago (2013). Hudes wrote the book for the Broadway musical In the Heights, which received the 2008 Tony Award for Best Musical, a Tony nomination for Best Book of a Musical, and was a 2009 Pulitzer Prize Finalist. Other works include the plays 26 Miles, Yemaya’s Belly, and the children’s musical Barrio Grrrl! Hudes grew up in West Philadelphia where she studied music with Don Rappaport, Dolly Kranzapolski, and Linda Hudes. She was later mentored by playwright Paula Vogel at Brown University. Hudes is an alumna of New Dramatists and sits on the Board of the Philadelphia Young Playwrights, which produced her first play in the tenth grade. She now lives in New York with her husband and daughter. www.quiara.com

Cast

GLORIA VIVICA BENAVIDES, Ginny
RODNEY GARZA, Grandpop
DAVID LUGO, Pop
CHRISTOPHER LLEWYN RAMIREZ, Elliot

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Bread

Bread is nourishment. Bread is legacy. Bread is life itself. And bread is money. This world premiere by award-winning Dallas-born actress and playwright Regina Taylor weaves a compelling family drama of hopes, fears, thwarted dreams, and dark secrets against a turbulent backdrop of racial tension and social upheaval. It is late 2016; a time of change. James and Ruth are a middle class couple from Oak Cliff, a historic south Dallas neighborhood on the verge of gentrification. They plan a bright future for their teenage son and his soon-to-be-born brother. But when James’ brother Jeb returns home, buried family tensions resurface and the past casts a troubling shadow across an uncertain future. Taylor’s stirring, timely story of identity and family asks: How can we prepare the next generation for what’s to come?

About The Director

LEAH C. GARDINER, Director
Select credits: Public Theater; Soho Rep (Obie Award); Manhattan Theatre Club; Atlantic Theater Company; NYSF; Urban Stages; Rattlestick; Keen Company; Zipper Theater;  Arena Stage; American Conservatory Theater; Berkeley Rep; Houston Shakespeare Festival; Oregon Shakespeare Festival; Alabama Shakespeare Festival;  Alliance Theatre; Baltimore Center Stage; Studio Theatre; TheatreWorks; South Coast Repertory; Contemporary American Theatre Festival; Barrington Stage; Philadelphia Theatre Company; City Theatre; the national tour of Wit with Judith Light (Kennedy Center, Ordway, among others). As a writer/director: Sony Entertainment, Cultures Collide; as a short film director, The Belle Of New Orleans, Alliance Theatre; as a film producer, Mother of George, best cinematography, Sundance. As an actor: playing herself in Ira Sachs’s recent film Little Men opposite Greg Kinnear. Leah holds a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and a M.F.A. in directing from the Yale School of Drama.

About the Playwright

REGINA TAYLOR, Playwright
Regina’s impressive body of work encompasses film, television, theatre, and writing. Not only is she comfortable on stage and screen, she is also an accomplished playwright. Her credits as playwright include Oo-Bla-Dee, for which she won the American Critics' Association new play award, Drowning Crow (her adaptation of Chekhov's The Seagull, which was produced on Broadway by Manhattan Theater Club in its inaugural season at the Biltmore Theater starring Alfre Woodard), The Dreams of Sarah Breedlove, A Night in Tunisia, Escape from Paradise, Watermelon Rinds, and Inside the Belly of the Beast. Taylor’s critically acclaimed Crowns was the most performed musical in the country for many years. Her play Magnolia premiered at Chicago's Goodman Theatre in March 2009 directed by Anna Shapiro, Tony Award winner for August: Osage County. Regina is a member and Artistic Associate of the Goodman Theatre. She received an honorary doctorate from DePaul University. She was raised in Dallas, Texas and still calls it home. Regina is best known to television audiences for her role as Lilly Harper in the series I'll Fly Away. She received many accolades for her performance in the show including winning a Golden Globe for Best Performance by an Actress in a TV Series, an NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, and two Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series.

Cast

STORMI DEMERSON, Ruth Baker
M. DENISE LEE, Carol Mills
DJORÉ NANCE, James Baker
BRYAN PITTS, Jebediah Baker
CALVIN SCOTT ROBERTS, Al Watkins
ELLIOT MARVIN SIMS, Jr. Baker

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The Last Five Years

Think about where you were five years ago. Think about who you were with. Think about that idealized image you had of yourself in five years time. Now think about where you are today. Is this where you thought you’d be? The universality of this question resonates through Jason Robert Brown’s intimately observant and often funny, The Last Five Years. Through opposing intersecting chronologies, this award-winning musical follows the story of Jamie and Cathy, two 20-something artists in New York, as their relationship blossoms and sours. The beginning, the end, and everything in between is put into perspective in this touching and sympathetic tale of love, loss, and timing.

About The Director

KELSEY LEIGH ERVI, Director
Kelsey is thrilled to be directing The Last Five Years. Other credits include The Great Distance Home (conceived/directed), Parade in Concert, Silent Sky, Lord of the Flies, The Spark (co-conceived/directed), The Santaland Diaries, The Tom Sawyer Project, Honky (WaterTower Theatre); Dogfight (Junior Players/University of Texas at Dallas); Precious Little (Echo Theatre); Love Me, Tinder (FIT Festival, world premiere); Ask Questions Later (Rite of Passage Theatre, world premiere); and Dani Girl (Greyman Theatre Company). Kelsey is also an accomplished actor, having worked with many area theatre companies including Dallas Theater Center, WaterTower Theatre, Stage West, Shakespeare Dallas, Uptown Players, Echo Theatre, and Shakespeare in the Bar. Currently, Kelsey is working on a research project in connection with her production of The Last Five Years. The project entitled “Love: A Deconstruction” is an interview series with individuals discussing their past relationships and, in particular, the objects they've held onto from those past relationships. You can learn more about the project here. Kelsey currently serves as Associate Artistic Director for WaterTower Theatre.

About the Writer / Composer

JASON ROBERT BROWN, Writer/Composer
Jason Robert Brown is the ultimate multi-hyphenate - an equally skilled composer, lyricist, conductor, arranger, orchestrator, director and performer - best known for his dazzling scores to several of the most renowned musicals of his generation, including the recently revived The Last Five Years, his debut song cycle Songs for a New World, and the seminal Parade, for which he won the 1999 Tony Award for Best Score. Jason Robert Brown has been hailed as "one of Broadway's smartest and most sophisticated songwriters since Stephen Sondheim" (Philadelphia Inquirer), and his "extraordinary, jubilant theater music" (Chicago Tribune) has been heard all over the world, whether in one of the hundreds of productions of his musicals every year or in his own incendiary live performances. The New York Times refers to Jason as "a leading member of a new generation of composers who embody high hopes for the American musical." He was awarded two TONY Awards in 2014 for writing and orchestrating The Bridges of Madison County, a musical adapted with Marsha Norman from the bestselling novel, directed by Bartlett Sher and starring Kelli O'Hara and Steven Pasquale. A film version of his epochal Off-Broadway musical The Last Five Years, starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, was released in 2014, directed by Richard LaGravenese. Honeymoon In Vegas, based on Andrew Bergman's film, premiered on Broadway in 2015 to rave reviews, including a review in the New York Times comparing Jason favorably to Rodgers and Hammerstein. His major musicals as composer and lyricist include: 13, written with Robert Horn and Dan Elish, which began its life in Los Angeles in 2007 and opened on Broadway in 2008 (and was subsequently directed by the composer for its West End premiere in 2012); The Last Five Years, which was cited as one of Time Magazine's 10 Best of 2001 and won Drama Desk Awards for Best Music and Best Lyrics (and was subsequently directed by the composer in its record-breaking Off-Broadway run at Second Stage Theatre in 2013); Parade, written with Alfred Uhry and directed by Harold Prince, which premiered at Lincoln Center Theatre in 1998, and subsequently won both the Drama Desk and New York Drama Critics' Circle Awards for Best New Musical, as well as garnering Jason the Tony Award for Original Score; and Songs for a New World, a theatrical song cycle directed by Daisy Prince, which played Off-Broadway in 1995, and has since been seen in hundreds of productions around the world. Parade was also the subject of a major revival directed by Rob Ashford, first at London's Donmar Warehouse and then at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. His orchestral adaptation of E.B. White's novel The Trumpet of the Swan premiered at the Kennedy Center with John Lithgow and the National Symphony Orchestra, and the CD was released on PS Classics. A live recording entitled Jason Robert Brown in Concert with Anika Noni Rose (LIVE) was released by JRB Records in 2015. Future projects include a new chamber musical created with Daisy Prince and Jonathan Marc Sherman called The Connector, and an untitled new piece created with Claudia Shear and Casey Nicholaw.  Jason is the winner of the 2002 Kleban Award for Outstanding Lyrics and the 1996 Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Foundation Award for Musical Theatre. Jason's songs, including the cabaret standard "Stars and the Moon," have been performed and recorded by Audra McDonald, Billy Porter, Betty Buckley, Karen Akers, Renée Fleming, Philip Quast, Jon Hendricks and many others, and his song "Someone To Fall Back On" was featured in the Walden Media film, Bandslam. As a soloist or with his band The Caucasian Rhythm Kings, Jason has performed sold-out concerts around the world. His first solo album, Wearing Someone Else's Clothes, was named one of Amazon.com's best of 2005, and is available from Sh-K-Boom Records. His collaboration with singer Lauren Kennedy, Songs of Jason Robert Brown, is available on PS Classics. Jason's piano sonata, Mr. Broadway was commissioned and premiered by Anthony De Mare at Carnegie Hall. Jason is also the composer of the incidental music for David Lindsay-Abaire's Kimberly Akimbo and Fuddy Meers, Marsha Norman's Last Dance, David Marshall Grant's Current Events, Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery, and the Irish Repertory Theater's production of Long Day's Journey Into Night, and he was a Tony Award nominee for his contributions to the score of Urban Cowboy the Musical. He has also contributed music to the hit Nickelodeon television series, The Wonder Pets. His scores are published by Hal Leonard. Jason taught musical theater performance and composition at the USC School of Dramatic Arts. For the musical Prince of Broadway, a celebration of the career of Harold Prince that premiered in 2015, Jason served as the musical supervisor and arranger. Other recent New York credits as conductor and arranger include Urban Cowboy the Musical on Broadway; Oliver Goldstick's play, Dinah Was, directed by David Petrarca, at the Gramercy Theatre and on national tour; and William Finn's A New Brain, directed by Graciela Daniele, at Lincoln Center Theater. Jason was the musical director of the pop vocal group, The Tonics, with whom he performed at the 1992 tribute to Stephen Sondheim at Carnegie Hall (recorded by RCA Victor); he was the conductor and orchestrator of Yoko Ono's musical, New York Rock, at the WPA Theatre (on Capitol Records); and he orchestrated Andrew Lippa's john and jen, Off-Broadway at Lamb's Theatre (Varese Sarabande). In 1994, Jason was the conductor and arranger of Michael John LaChiusa's The Petrified Prince, directed by Harold Prince, at the Public Theatre. Additionally, Jason served as the orchestrator and arranger of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams's score for a proposed musical of Star Wars. Jason also took over as musical director for the Off-Broadway hit When Pigs Fly. Jason has conducted and created arrangements and orchestrations for Liza Minnelli, John Pizzarelli, Tovah Feldshuh, and Laurie Beechman, among many others. Jason studied composition at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., with Samuel Adler, Christopher Rouse, and Joseph Schwantner. He lives with his wife, composer Georgia Stitt, and their daughters in New York City. Jason is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and the American Federation of Musicians Local 802 & 47. Visit him on the web at www.jasonrobertbrown.com.

Cast

MONIQUE ABRY, Catherine Hiatt
SETH WOMACK, Jamie Wellerstein

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Hand To God

The “darkly delightful” (The New York Times), blasphemous Broadway hit that has been taking the country by storm, Hand to God, makes its regional debut at WaterTower Theatre! Texas native Robert Askins thrusts us into a surreal church basement, where a young man’s foul-mouthed hand puppet - that may be possessed by the devil - wreaks havoc and exposes hypocrisy with ruthlessness and side-splitting humor. Director Joanie Schultz's long-running hit production of Hand to God (Studio Theatre, Washington, D.C.) was nominated for six Helen Hayes Awards including Best Director! “This show is completely immersive and will leave you insanely entertained” (DC Theatre Scene).

About The Director

JOANIE SCHULTZ, Director
Joanie Schultz was recently appointed as Artistic Director of WaterTower Theatre, and has been serving in the position since January 1st, 2017. Before joining WaterTower Theatre, Joanie served as Associate Artistic Producer at Victory Gardens Theater, as part of the Leadership U One-on-One Fellowship funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation administered through TCG, the national non-profit regional theatre service organization. She is also a freelance director, with recent productions at Kansas City Repertory Theatre, Studio Theatre (Washington D.C.), The Cleveland Play House, Goodman Theatre, Steppenwolf Theatre, and Victory Gardens Theater. She was a Drama League Fellow, The Goodman Theatre Michael Maggio Director Fellow, the SDSF Denham Fellow, and Lincoln Center Theatre Directors Lab participant. She is an ensemble member at Steep Theatre, Artistic Associate at Victory Gardens Theater, and artistic cabinet member at Studio Theatre in Washington, D.C. Joanie has also served on faculty at Columbia College and University of Chicago. She received her B.A. in Theatre/Directing at Columbia College and her M.F.A. in Theatre Directing from Northwestern University. 

About the Playwright

ROBERT ASKINS, Playwright
Robert Askins was born in Cypress, Texas. His Tony-nominated, Obie Award-winning play Hand to God finished it’s run on London’s West End (Olivier-nominated for Best New Comedy) after it opened on Broadway in April 2015, following two critically-acclaimed runs at Ensemble Studio Theatre and MCC Theater, where it was named NYTimes critic’s Pick and called “the most entertaining show of 2014.” His newest play Permission made its world premiere off-Broadway in spring 2015 at MCC Theatre. His play Fish Display was part of the 2012 Ojai Playwrights Conference and Permission was part of the 2014 conference. Rob has received two EST/Sloan grants, the Helen Merrill Emerging Playwrights Award, and an Arch and Bruce Brown Award for Playwriting. Rob is an I-73 and Youngblood alum and a graduate of Baylor University.

Cast

DEBBIE CRAWFORD, Jessica
PARKER GRAY, Jason/Tyrone
SHANNON MCGRANN, Margery
GARRET STORMS, Timothy
THOMAS WARD, Pastor Greg

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Special Thanks