Calarco to Direct Off-Broadway Musical Burnt Part Boys
By Kenneth Jones
03 Nov 2009
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Joe Calarco
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| photo by Aubrey Reuben | Joe Calarco has joined the creative team of the new Off-Broadway musical The Burnt Part Boys, replacing Erica Schmidt, co-producers Playwrights Horizons and the Vineyard Theatre announced.
Calarco is a four-time Helen Hayes Award-winning director known for Shakespeare's R&J. The musical by Mariana Elder (book), Nathan Tysen (lyrics) and Chris Miller (music) was directed by Calarco in an earlier lab staging for Barrington Stage Company. Schmidt, also attached to its development, is not continuing with the production by mutual agreement.
The Burnt Part Boys will have its Off-Broadway premiere in spring 2010 in a co-production by Playwrights Horizons and the Vineyard Theatre at Playwrights Horizons (as previously-announced by both non-profit theatres). No casting has been announced.
Following a developmental Lab Production at The Vineyard last spring, The Burnt Part Boys was presented this past summer at New York Stage and Film at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie.
The three-theatre development of the show comes under the aegis of the Musicals in Partnership Initiative and is funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation "to develop new musicals in partnership with a regional theater, wholly within the non-profit system from start to finish."
Calarco is the adaptor/director of Shakespeare's R&J, which ran for a year Off-Broadway, becoming the longest running version of Romeo and Juliet in New York history, and earning him a Lortel Award. He also directed the play's award-winning premieres in Chicago, Washington, DC, London and Tokyo.
He previously worked with Burnt Part writers Chris Miller and Nathan Tysen, directing their song cycle Fugitive Songs (Drama Desk nomination, Best Musical Revue).
Calarco directed the Playwrights Horizons musical Floyd and Clea Under the Western Sky. His additional New York credits include Boy (Primary Stages), …in the absence of spring (Second Stage), Bury the Dead (Transport Group) and Sarah, Plain and Tall. He's earned four Helen Hayes Awards for Best Director (Assassins, Urinetown, Nijinsky's Last Dance and Side Show, all at Signature Theatre) and he’s currently directing Philadelphia Theatre Company's production of The Light in the Piazza.
According to the co-producers, "The Burnt Part Boys is set in West Virginia in 1962. The musical follows a group of teenagers whose fathers were killed ten years earlier in a tragic coal mining accident. When they learn that the mine will be reopened, they set out secretly in the hope of seeing the site, and keeping it closed. A deeply moving and powerful odyssey, The Burnt Part Boys is an unforgettable coming of age tale set to a haunting and distinctive bluegrass and pop-inspired score."
Composer Chris Miller and Lyricist Nathan Tysen were the 2008 winners of The Vineyard's Kitty Carlisle Hart Musical Theatre Award, as well as the Jonathan Larson Award and the Richard Rodgers Award. Their collaborations include Fugitive Songs, presented Off-Broadway last season, and The Mysteries of Harris Burdick (book by Joe Calarco), which received a workshop production at Barrington Stage in 2008. Book writer Mariana Elder's plays, sketch comedy and musicals have been performed across the country, including Barrington Stage Co., Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Director's Lab, Theatre for a New City and Manhattan Theater Source.
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