Full programming for New York City Center’s 2022-2023 Season was announced today. Following last season’s successful reopening for live in person performances, the 2022-223 Season includes marquee series Fall for Dance Festival and Encore!, and the return of a new annual dance series: Artists at the Center and City Center Dance Festival. Manhattan’s first performing arts center, New York City Center has presented the best in music, theater, and dance to generations of New Yorkers for nearly 80 years.
The beloved musical theater series Encores! eagerly welcomes Mary-Mitchell Campbell for her first season as the new Music Director. A consummate interpreter of the work of Stephen Sondheim and a host of other Broadway greats, Campbell is widely respected for her work as a conductor, music director, orchestrator, composer, and arranger on productions like Road Show, The Prom, Some Like it Hot, and the 2006 revival of Company. She now takes up the baton leading the acclaimed Encores! Orchestra. Campbell joins Artistic Director Lear deBessonet and Producing Creative Director Clint Ramos for an exciting 2023 Encores! Season of musical theater revivals that continue to expand the Encores! family of artists and audiences.
Starting February 1 – 5, director Chay Yew explores Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel’s Tony Award-winning musical The Light in the Piazza. Tony winner Ruthie Ann Miles returns to the New York stage as Margaret Johnson, a 1950s American mother touring Florence with her daughter and struggling to embrace undreamt-of opportunities in the shadow of a tragic accident. Buoyed by Guettel’s lush score, Yew’s production transmutes the musical’s drama of encounter across barriers of language, culture, and ability into something as essential as it is revelatory.
Next is a hidden gem of the Broadway canon: Jerry Herman’s 1969 musical Dear World, March 15 – 19. In this madcap musical fable, a motley band of outcasts must rally together to save their picturesque Chaillot neighborhood in Paris from a greedy cabal of oil-hungry bankers. Tony winner Donna Murphy takes on the musical’s giddy, garish heroine, Countess Aurelia, performing some of Herman’s sweetest and most sumptuous songs, including “I Don’t Want to Know,” “Kiss Her Now,” and “Each Tomorrow Morning.” This delightful romp, directed and choreographed by Josh Rhodes, blends Herman’s trademark optimism with a dash of social critique and a hint of ecological urgency: a perfect blend for our times.
Closing out the Encores! Season is a special two-week run of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (May 3 – 14), marking the musical’s first major New York production in nearly 40 years. Directed by Encores! Artistic Director Lear deBessonet, this landmark revival revels in the brassy, boisterous sound of such classics as “I’d Do Anything,” “Oom Pah Pah!,” and “Consider Yourself.” The story of a child who dares to trust in others, search for love, and ask for more in London’s seedy underworld, the coming-of-age tale promises to inspire a new generation of musical theater lovers.
As previously announced, the Annual Gala Presentation Parade, directed by Michael Arden and starring Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt, opens November 1 with a benefit performance followed by a gala dinner at the Ziegfeld Ballroom. Performances of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry’s Tony Award-winning musical run through November 6. Funds raised by all seven performances allow City Center to continue to provide access to the performing arts by subsidizing education programs and affordable tickets throughout the year. Tickets starting at $35 go on sale to the general public at noon today and can be purchased by visiting NYCityCenter.org