Transport Group has announced the lineup of productions for its 2024-2025 season, which includes two full productions, two three-week workshops, four readings of works in development, and a Carnegie Hall concert.
As previously reported, the season will include a revival of Willian Inge's Bus Stop, featuring an all-Asian American cast. The co-production between Transport Group, Classic Stage Company, and NAATCO will begin performances in May 2025. Transport Group Artistic Director Jack Cummings III is set to direct.
The season will kick off with the new musical Split, running September 5-8. The work has been commissioned by Transport Group, with Cummings III directing. With a book by Michele Lowe and music and lyrics by Zoe Sarnak, Split follows a former research scientist at Los Alamos during WWII and her daughter as they embark on a road trip to the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1953. The cast will feature Grace Beaudet, Legna Cedillo, J. Antonio Rodriguez, David Rowen, Katie Thompson, and Jacob Keith Watson. Split is produced in collaboration with The New London Barn Playhouse.
Mary Testa will star in a three-week workshop of Beautiful Jolie Gabor, Her Glamorous Three Daughters, and Always the Happiness Is Life, a new musical penned by Michael John LaChiusa and commissioned by Transport Group. The musical centers on family matriarch Jolie Gabor, a Hungarian WWII immigrant who is fighting to create a life where persecution can never affect her family again.
The second workshop in the season will be 1939, an experimental work created by Cummings III. John Cariani and Kelly McAndrew will star in the production, which tells the story of a middle-aged couple trying to escape Europe at the beginning of the Second World War using only dialogue from major Hollywood films of 1939.
The season will also feature readings of two musicals and two plays currently in development: Mourning Songs by Ryan Langer, The Pet Project by Laurie Graff and Nancy Shayne, Our Table by Kirsten Guenther, and The Sea & The Stars by Harrison David Rivers.
To conclude the season, Transport Group will return to Carnegie Hall June 26, 2025, for a one-night-only concert of a classic musical to be announced. The evening will continue the ongoing Anne L. Bernstein Concert Series, following the sold-out success of Transport Group's Follies concert in June 2024.
“Perhaps our most robust season to date, Transport Group’s upcoming slate focuses sharply on the American experience, allowing audiences and artists the chance to explore its many meanings together,” Cummings III said in a statement. “This season will showcase eight works, three of them commissioned projects, in different stages of what it takes to bring a play or musical to fruition, from reading to opening night, culminating in our mainstage production Bus Stop next May, continuing our collaborations with venerable companies CSC and NAATCO.”
Visit TransportGroup.com for more information.