Just last month Audible Theater celebrated its fifth Anniversary at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. For half a decade Audible has presented cutting edge productions and live-recorded concerts that are ultimately released as Audible Originals.
During the special celebration, before a packed crowd, artists who performed on this historic Greenwich Village stage shared how their lives were impacted after presenting a show with Audible Theater.
Solea Pfeiffer, who performed her deeply personal electrifying show You Are Here reflected on the experience of doing her piece that revolved around her multi-cultural identity and stepping fully into herself.
“I look back on my time with Audible as a moment that totally changed how I think about myself,” said Pfeiffer who currently stars in Hadestown on Broadway. She also starred as Penny Lane in Almost Famous and played Eliza in the first national tour of Hamilton. “I created You are Here for the 13-year-old little mixed-kid me who didn’t really know where she fit in. My mom said ‘Hey, write this for you. Write this for you when you were 13.’”
Currently, Audible Theater is presenting the New York premiere of the play Swing State. Originally produced at the Goodman Theatre, Swing State was written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Gilman and directed by Robert Falls. The play, about the power and cost of trust and connection, leaves audiences at the edge of their seats.
In its five year history Audible Theater has presented 42 live shows, commissioned 50 playwrights and released 114 audio theater pieces. And the offerings keep building. During the celebration Kate Navin, head of Audible Theater announced new productions that will be released as Audible Originals and will be available to millions of listeners around the globe.
“Supporting creative exploration, uplifting emerging voices and spotlighting some of our generation’s most acclaimed talent is at the heart of our vision for Audible Theater,” said Navin. “For the next five years and beyond, our home at the Minetta Lane will not only be a space for theater but also for live storytelling, including musical performances, podcasting events, and more.”
The Energy Curfew Music Hour, an acoustic musical variety show, featuring the Grammy-winning band Punch Brothers, will debut in November. In early February Laura Benanti will perform original music in Nobody Cares, a show that she created with Todd Almond. Audible Theater also commissioned their first musical, Dead Outlaw, which will have its world premiere beginning in February.
Dead Outlaw has book by Itamar Moses, music and lyrics by Erik Della Penna and David Yazbek, and is directed by David Cromer—creative forces behind the musical The Band’s Visit. The show centers around Elmer McCurdy an outlaw who lived during the early 19th Century and his mummified remains that became a side-show attraction traveling around the nation for more than six decades.
The celebration also featured musical performances from Laura Benanti, Solea Pfeiffer, the music duo Sinfolk (Gabriel Ruiz and J), David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna. Colman Domingo, Santino Fontana, and Michael Cruz Kayne also spoke as did Audible founder Don Katz who movingly shared how Audible came to be.
“The idea that became Audible began to distract and often consume me back in 1994. I could not stop thinking about the idea of conveying to others the music I heard when I read fluent prose or listened to profound soliloquies full of artfully composed words,” said Katz who had a full-time writing career for two decades. “The idea was always to invite the culture’s most gifted artists to cross over into a world that harked back to the primal pleasures of being read to as a child, and to create a mainstream media category defined by a singular aesthetic.”
Katz went on to share that early on in Audible’s history he was able to convince Robin Williams and Ricky Gervais that their words would be akin to private performances for listeners. “During the early phases Audible positioned books as scripts,” said Katz. “And we invited many of the world’s greatest performers to offer nuanced interpretations.”
To create Audible Theater Katz ultimately turned to a dream posse of theater makers and tastemakers for their expertise and insight including his wife Leslie, Sir Tom Stoppard, Whoopi Goldberg, Bette Midler, Alan Cumming, Liz Jones, founder of Page 73 and Oskar Eustis.
Audible Theater team strives to be agents of change and inspire people to expand their thinking. As Katz shared as Audible Theater grows “…it will continue to slalom around risk and even institutional resistance to chase great big visions of the possible like this one.”
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