London's Union Theatre will host an exciting first between September 29 and October 17, when Take Note Theatre will present the UK and European professional premiere of Michael John LaChiusa's award winning off-Broadway musical, First Lady Suite.
LaChiusa, a composer/lyricist/librettist and professor at the Graduate Musical Theater Writing Programme at the Tisch School of Arts at New York University, has established himself as one of the key figures in the post-Sondheim era as a creator of dramatically complex and musically challenging musicals, including Hello Again, Marie Christine, See What I Wanna See and Giant (a musical adaptation of Edna Ferber's epic novel which premiered earlier this year at The Signature Theater in Arlington, Virginia).
First Lady Suite is a chamber musical, first staged by the New York Shakespeare Festival at the prestigious off-Broadway Public Theater in 1993, that weaves together a number of stories, delving into the hearts and minds of some of America's most famous First Ladies - Eleanor Roosevelt, Bess Truman, Mamie Eisenhower, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy and Ladybird Johnson. This imaginative and irreverent look behind the scenes of the White House and the women who lived inside its walls was revived by the Transport Group at New York's Connelly Theater in 2004, where it received two Drama Desk nominations and rave reviews. A cast recording was released by PS Classics in 2003.
The show's first professional staging on this side of the Atlantic will be presented in an exciting new partnership by the Union Theatre and Take Note Theatre. Southwark's Union Theatre has a growing reputation as one of London's top musical theatre venues and, in the past year, has staged highly successful and critically acclaimed revivals of Sweeney Todd, Company, Annie Get Your Gun, The Pajama Game and the award-winning new musical Edges. They staged a hit production of another LaChiusa musical, The Wild Party, back in 2003 and the theatre won a Peter Brook Empty Space Award in 2008. Take Note Theatre (described by The Scotsman as "A company to catch up with in 2009" ) have staged sell-out runs of new musicals at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival as well as London's Theatre 503 and the Jermyn Street Theatre.
The production will be directed by Rania Jumaily, whose theatre credits include The Bully Composition (Southwark Playhouse), The Flags, A Conversation, An Ideal Husband, Roots, The Children's Hour, and Three Sisters (all Royal Exchange), Jamie The Saxt (Finborough), A Model Girl (Greenwich) and Kafka's Dick (Watford Palace). Jumaily recently assisted Neil Bartlett on Everybody Loves A Winner, a new piece commissioned by the Royal Exchange and Manchester International Festival.
