Transformative performances from the banks of the Hudson to around the world.
Explore what’s on beyond Bard.
Illinoise
MUSIC & LYRICS BY SUFJAN STEVENS (BASED ON THE ALBUM ILLINOIS)
STORY BY JUSTIN PECK AND JACKIE SIBBLIES DRURY
DIRECTED & CHOREOGRAPHED BY JUSTIN PECK
Strictly Limited Broadway Engagement
Now through August 10
From Bard to Broadway! Following lauded, sold-out runs at Bard SummerScape, Chicago Shakespeare Theater, and Park Avenue Armory, Illinoise is transferring to Broadway for 16 weeks only beginning April 24.
Based on the landmark Sufjan Stevens album, Illinoise “springs to epic life onstage” (The Washington Post) in a “mysterious, deeply moving, and unforgettable dance-musical hybrid” (The New York Times) directed and choreographed by Tony Award winner Justin Peck.
Told through live music performed by an 11-member band, three vocalists, and impressionistic choreography, Peck and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Jackie Sibblies Drury have crafted an original story that bursts with feeling. As friends gather around a campfire, sharing stories of first love, grief, and growing up, “Illinoise explores the hot zone between childhood and adulthood when emotions can be at their most overwhelming” (The New York Times).
Photo by Liz Lauren
Cultural Exchange Rate
TANIA EL KHOURY
Aula Maxima, University of Galway (Ireland)
July 16–28
Cultural Exchange Rate, a 2019 Fisher Center LAB commission, is an interactive live art project in which Tania El Khoury shares her family memoirs of life in border villages between Lebanon and Syria. The artist examines the universal never-ending story of migration through a family diary of the physical borders crossed and the recognition that the cruelest of borders are invisible to the eye and present in everyday life.
Cultural Exchange Rate is based on recorded interviews with El Khoury’s late grandmother, oral histories collected from her village in Lebanon, the discovery of lost relatives in Mexico City, and the family’s attempt to secure dual citizenship. The audience is invited to immerse their heads into one family’s secret boxes to explore sounds, images, and textures that trace more than a century of border crossings.
Photo by Argenis Apolinario
SCAT!… The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar
URBAN BUSH WOMEN
Mark Taper Forum
Los Angeles, CA
November 22–24
Set in a fictional jazz club, SCAT!… The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar (a 2024 Bard SummerScape commission) is a dance-driven musical that tells a love story of two people making their way during the Great Migration through song, dance and storytelling. It is a powerful tale of one family and what happens when dreams encounter the realities of American life in the 40s & 50s. SCAT!… The Complex Lives of Al & Dot, Dot & Al Zollar features an original jazz score performed by a live band.
Photo by Maria Baranova
Ulysses
ELEVATOR REPAIR SERVICE
“A heroic achievement…Elevator Repair Service’s adaptation merrily condenses the choicest essentials of James Joyce’s magnum opus.” —\illage Voice
James Joyce’s Ulysses has fascinated, perplexed, scandalized, and/or defeated readers for over a century. Building on a rich history of staging modernist works—Gatz, The Sound and the Fury, The Select (The Sun Also Rises)—Elevator Repair Service (ERS) takes on this Mount Everest of twentieth-century literature.
Seven performers sit down for a sober reading but soon find themselves guzzling pints, getting in brawls, and committing debaucheries as they careen on a fast-forward tour through Joyce’s funhouse of styles. With madcap antics and a densely layered sound design, ERS presents a “riveting” (New York Times) new stage adaptation of Joyce’s life-affirming masterpiece—first commissioned for 2024 Bard SummerScape.
University Musical Society
Ann Arbor, MI
October 19–20
CAP UCLA
April 4–5, 2025
Photo by Maria Baranova
Maestro
The Orchestra Now is featured in the Netflix film Maestro, starring Bradley Cooper as the renowned composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein.
TŌN was selected to perform Beethoven’s 8th Symphony at Tanglewood in the film, with Cooper-as-Bernstein conducting, which is also included on the Deutsche Grammophon release of the film’s original soundtrack, conducted by Metropolitan Opera Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Maestro is available to stream on Netflix, and the original soundtrack album is available on CD, vinyl, and digital platforms.
