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WE THINK YOU OUGHTA KNOW 10 CREATOR CORPS 14 A GREAT RUN
PERFORMANCE PREVIEW WE THINK YOU OUGHTA KNOW
TOURING PRODUCTION OF JAGGED LITTLE PILL MAKES ITS DEBUT IN LOUISVILLE
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PERFORMANCE PREVIEW
August 31 - September 1, 2022
In partnership with Kentucky Performing Arts, PNC Broadway in Louisville is thrilled to announce the national debut of Jagged Little Pill at The Kentucky Center for two nights only — August 31 and September 1 at 7:30 p.m.
Inspired by the seminal rock album of the same name by seventime Grammy Award winner Alanis Morissette, tickets to the Tony and Grammy awarding-winning production are available at KentuckyPerformingArts.org.
“We are so excited to host the launch of the national tour of Jagged Little Pill right here in Louisville,” said Leslie Broecker, President of PNC Broadway in Louisville. “The Kentucky Center has been instrumental in making this opportunity a reality, and we are continuously grateful for their support and collaboration.”
“We are so fortunate to have our amazing partners, PNC Broadway in Louisville, who bring the most exciting shows on Broadway right here to our own backyard,” says Kim Baker, President and CEO of Kentucky Performing Arts. “Working together, we were able to attract the launch of the Jagged Little Pill tour, providing the opportunity to shine a national spotlight on the commonwealth.”
ABOUT THE SHOW
Directed by Tony Award winner Diane Paulus (Waitress, Pippin), Jagged Little Pill is an “electrifying, visceral, and stunning” (The Hollywood Reporter) musical with an original story by Tony and Academy Award-winning writer Diablo Cody (Juno, Tully), about a perfectly imperfect American family that “vaults the audience to its collective feet” (The Guardian).
Nominated for a season-record of 15 Tony Awards following its Broadway premiere, The New York Times declared the show “redemptive, rousing, and real... Jagged Little Pill stands alongside the original musicals that have sustained the best hopes of Broadway.”
Ignited by Morissette’s groundbreaking lyrics and music — from beloved hits such as “You Oughta Know,” “Head Over Feet,” “Hand In My Pocket,” and “Ironic,” to brand-new songs written for the show — Jagged Little Pill features explosive choreography by Tony Award nominee and frequent Beyoncé collaborator Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (Apesh*t, Love Drought/Sandcastles Live at The Grammys), and the raw power of an onstage band under the musical supervision, orchestrations and arrangements
− Leslie Broecker, President of PNC Broadway in Louisville
Heidi Blickenstaff, Runako Campbell, and Morgan Dudley in the Broadway production of Jagged Little Pill. Photo by Matthew Murphy.
of Grammy, Tony and Pulitzer Prize winner Tom Kitt (Next to Normal, American Idiot).
The Jagged Little Pill creative team includes Tony-nominated Scenic Designer Riccardo Hernandez (Parade), Tony-nominated Costume Designer Emily Rebholz (Dear Evan Hansen), Tony Award-winning Lighting Designer Justin Townsend (Moulin Rouge!), Tony-nominated Sound Designer Jonathan Deans (Waitress), and Tony-nominated Video Designer Lucy Mackinnon (Spring Awakening). Hair, Wig, and Makeup Design is provided by J. Jared Janas (Sunset Boulevard).
AN AWARD-WINNING RUN
Jagged Little Pill officially opened on Broadway December 5, 2019, at the Broadhurst Theatre after beginning previews November 3. Prior to Broadway, the show completed a recordbreaking, sold-out run at American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. That pre-Broadway world premiere production ran for 79 sold-out performances, from May 5 to July 15, 2018, marking the longest-running and highest-grossing production in A.R.T.’s history.
Jagged Little Pill concluded its award-winning Broadway run on December 17, 2021, after playing 36 previews and 171 performances. That same month, the production made its international debut in Australia at Theatre Royal Sydney. The Australian tour is currently playing at Comedy Theatre, in Melbourne.
Released on June 13, 1995, the tremendous success of Alanis Morissette’s album of the same name skyrocketed her to become the bestselling international debut artist in history; a title she still holds, with the record’s sales reaching 33 million copies worldwide.
Now, 25 years after its release, Jagged Little Pill continues to be one of the Top 20 best-selling albums of all time. With 10 eclectic and acclaimed albums released over the subsequent years, Morissette’s music has garnered seven Grammy Awards (with 14 nominations), a Golden Globe nomination, and total sales of over 60 million albums. In 2019, Atlantic Records partnered with the Broadway production for the release of its original Broadway cast recording, adding the show to the label’s elite roster of Grammy Awardwinning artists and cast albums. The cast album for Jagged Little Pill was officially released on December 6, 2019 — the day after the show’s opening night on Broadway — and won the 2021 Grammy Award for Best Musical Theatre Album.
In the fall of 2020, the musical garnered a season-leading 15 Tony Nominations — including Best Musical — and Grand Central Publishing released a hardcover coffee table book following the journey of Jagged Little Pill to Broadway, with behind-the-scenes photos and stories from Alanis Morissette, Diablo Cody, the cast and more. Following the show’s big Grammy Award win in 2021, Jagged Little Pill also won Tony Awards for Best Book of a Musical (Diablo Cody) and Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Lauren Patten).
The Broadway company of Jagged Little Pill. Photo by Matthew Murphy. Lauren Patten and the Broadway company of
Jagged Little Pill. Photo by Matthew Murphy.
CREATOR CORPS
TEDDY ABRAMS & LOUISVILLE ORCHESTRA SELECT THREE COMPOSERS FOR NEW RESIDENCY PROGRAM
by Louisville Orchestra
ong praised for his visionary thinking about the role of an orchestra in its community, galvanizing Music Director Teddy Abrams and the Louisville Orchestra (LO) are pleased to announce the inaugural group of creators for their newest initiative, the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, which transcends traditional commissioning and composer-in-residence paradigms with a radically new model for L collaborating with symphony orchestras in the 21st century.
They are Lisa Bielawa, TJ Cole, and Tyler Taylor.
Throughout their residencies, the creators will compose new works to be performed by the orchestra and other settings, participate in educational and community engagement activities, and be active, engaged citizens of their neighborhood.
The composers will each have a preexisting work performed on the opening night program on September 17. The world premieres of their new works will be performed in Louisville during the 2022-23 season on Classics programs on January 14,
March 4 and 11 – the latter two dates as part of the Festival of American Music – and will appear as well on Music Without
Borders programs.
The Creators Corps is an innovative, first-of-its-kind program that puts artists in the community for deeper integration with the orchestra and the city of Louisville. LO selects three creators in the spring to move to Louisville for the upcoming season and live in the Shelby Park neighborhood for at least 30 weeks, serving as LO staff members with an annual salary of $40,000, as well as health insurance, housing, and a custom-built studio workspace.
The program is funded by a three-year, $750,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation and from the generous support of additional individual donors locally and nationally. Lisa, TJ, and Tyler are examples of consummate 21st-century artist-leaders; their musical talents match their intellects and they all share a remarkable sensitivity to the needs of the world beyond the boundaries of contemporary musical composition.
− Teddy Abrams, Music Director, Louisville Orchestra
A COLLECTION OF UNIQUE PERSPECTIVES
“I was overwhelmed by the diverse talent of the 186 applicants for the initial year of the LO’s Creators Corps,” says Abrams, who was named Conductor of the Year for 2022 by Musical America and begins his eighth season with the orchestra in September.
“I believe this reflects the widespread desire for artists to build deeper and more impactful relationships with civic institutions and the communities they represent. With an extraordinarily dedicated selection committee, we were able to find three exceptional creators to join us in Louisville for the 2022-23 Season. Lisa, TJ, and Tyler are examples of consummate 21st-century artist-leaders; their musical talents match their intellects and they all share a remarkable sensitivity to the needs of the world beyond the boundaries of contemporary musical composition,” he says.
(L-R) As part of the new residency, composers TJ Cole, Tyler Taylor and Lisa Bielawa will move to Louisville and work as LO staff members for 30 weeks during the upcoming season. Photo courtesy of Louisville Orchestra.
A genre-defying orchestra in Louisville? Believe it.
— Time magazine
“While each creator has a unique background and aesthetic perspective, their collective accomplishments and capabilities will make them a tremendous part of the LO family and the creative fabric of Louisville (and in Tyler’s case, as a Louisvillian, we are honored to offer him the Orchestra’s broad civic platform),” adds Abrams. “This is an historic and immensely consequential moment for the LO, and I can’t wait to begin collaborating with these three outstanding creators.”
“The Creators Corps marks a new chapter for innovation and leadership for the Louisville Orchestra, and I am proud that we are demonstrating the most impactful way composers, community leaders, musicians, and civic partners can come together to fundamentally change the conversation around creativity, the creative process, access to and impact from the arts,” says Graham Parker, the Louisville Orchestra’s Interim Executive Director. “The entire LO family is dedicated to delivering on this new model and showcasing it across Metro Louisville, the commonwealth and the country.”
ABOUT THE COMPOSERS
Lisa Bielawa
Composer, producer, and vocalist Lisa Bielawa is a Rome Prize winner in musical composition. She takes inspiration for her work from literary sources and close artistic collaborations. Gramophone reports, “Bielawa is gaining gale force as a composer, churning out impeccably groomed works that at once evoke the layered precision of Vermeer and the conscious recklessness of Jackson Pollock.”
Her music has been described as “ruminative, pointillistic and harmonically slightly tart,” by the New York Times, and “fluid and arresting ... at once dramatic and probing,” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the recipient of the 2017 Music Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters and a 2020 OPERA America Grant for Female Composers. She was named a William Randolph Hearst Visiting Artist Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society for 2018 and was Artist-in-Residence at Kaufman Music Center in New York for the 2020-21 season.
Bielawa has established herself as one of today’s leading composers and performers, one who consistently executes work that incorporates community-making as part of her artistic vision. She has created music for public spaces in Lower Manhattan, the banks of the Tiber River in Rome, on the sites of former airfields in Berlin and in San Francisco, and to mark the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall; she composed and produced a 12-episode, made-for-TV opera that featured over 350 musicians and was filmed in locations across the country; she was a co-founder in 1997 of the MATA Festival, which continues to support young composers; and for five years she was the artistic director of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, bringing the chorus to the NY PHIL BIENNIAL and introducing the young performers to the music of today through numerous premieres and commissions from leading composers. From 2019-22, Bielawa was the founding Composer-inResidence and Chief Curator of the Philip Glass Institute (PGI) at The New School’s College of the Performing Arts.
In addition to performing as the vocalist in the Philip Glass Ensemble, Bielawa performs in many of her own works as well as in the music of John Zorn, Anthony Braxton, Michael Gordon, and others. She will have her third residency as a performer/ composer at Zorn’s venue The Stone in November 2022. She recently made her orchestral conducting debut leading the Mannes String Orchestra in a special presentation by the Philip Glass Institute, featuring her music, music by Jon Gibson and David T. Little, and Philip Glass’s Symphony No. 3.
Born in San Francisco into a musical family, Bielawa played the violin and piano, sang, and wrote music from early childhood. She moved to New York two weeks after receiving her B.A. in Literature in 1990 from Yale University and became an active participant in New York musical life.
TJ Cole
TJ Cole (they/she) is an American composer, originally from the suburbs of Atlanta. They have been commissioned by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Carnegie Hall, the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, the New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Nashville in Harmony, Intersection, Time For Three, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, Play On Philly, the Music in May Festival, Music in the Vineyards, the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, One Book One Philadelphia, and the Bakken Trio, among others.
Their music has been performed by various ensembles, including the Minnesota Orchestra, the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, the Utah Symphony, Ensemble Connect, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Curtis Symphony Orchestra, the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra, the Dover Quartet,the Bakken Trio, and the Nebula Ensemble, among others. They have also worked on numerous projects with Time for Three as an orchestrator and arranger, and served as a composer-in-residence at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in 2014.
Cole has also been a singer-songwriter, producer, and engineer in the fully electronic synth-pop band Twin Pixie, which focuses on making music at the intersection of queerness, pop culture, and the supernatural.
LO on stage at The Kentucky Center in May 2022. Photo courtesy of Louisville Orchestra.
Cole has participated in composition programs, including the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, the Lake Champlain Chamber Music Festival, and the Next Festival of Emerging Artists, and studied with Samuel Adler for a summer at the Freie Universität Berlin. They have won two ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer awards (2014 and 2020), including the Leo Kaplan Award in 2020 for their string sextet Playtime.
Cole has also been involved with music-related community outreach projects. They collaborated with bassist Ranaan Meyer as an orchestrator on his project The World We All Deserve Through Music, and with First Person Arts by co-curating and performing in a musical story slam. During a yearlong ArtistYear Fellowship (2016-17), Cole was able to co-run and collaborate in musical performances and songwriting workshops with residents of Project HOME, a Philadelphia-based organization fighting to end chronic homelessness.
Cole received their Bachelor's degree in composition from the Curtis Institute of Music, and studied at Interlochen Arts Academy. Their mentors include John Boyle Jr., Jennifer Higdon, David Ludwig, and Richard Danielpour.
Tyler Taylor
Tyler Taylor, a Louisville native, is a composer-performer whose work explores the different ways identity can be expressed in musical scenarios. Common among these pieces is a sense of contradiction — sometimes whimsical, sometimes alarming — that comes from the interaction of diverse musical layers. This expression of contradiction likely comes from his being a person of mixed race; being raised on hip hop and R&B while inheriting a European tradition of Western art music as his primary form of musical expression in spite of having little or no other cultural ties to Europe; and pursuing a career in a field that generally lacks representation of his demographic. Taylor has recently held fellowships at the National Orchestra Institute and the Bowdoin International Music Festival. During these residencies, he had several works performed, including two premieres, and worked alongside Marin Alsop, Derek Bermel, Andreia Pinto Correia, and many other distinguished artists. His work has been recognized by awards including the BMI Student Composition Award (2019) and the Howard Hanson Ensemble Prize (2017, 2016), and has been featured during the College Orchestra Directors Association Convention (2022), the University of Louisville Annual New Music Festival (2018, 2017, 2016) and the Midwest Composers Symposium (2019). He has recently been commissioned by the Washington and Lee University Orchestra, the Chicago Composers Orchestra, the Albany Symphony Contemporary Ensemble, the Youth Performing Arts School, the Louisville Orchestra, Indiana University New Music Ensemble, and the Indiana Bandmasters Association.
In addition to his composition, Taylor is an avid performer of contemporary music, playing horn in many of his own works and those by his colleagues. He has honed his skill as a contemporary performer in groups such as the IU New Music Ensemble, Eastman’s Musica Nova, Ossia New Music, the UofL New Music Ensemble, and more.
Taylor holds degrees from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music (Doctorate in Music in Composition, with minors in music theory and horn performance), the Eastman School of Music (Master of Music in Composition and Horn), and the University of Louisville (Bachelor of Music in Composition). His principal composition teachers include Tansy Davies, Aaron Travers, Don Freund, David Liptak, Robert Morris, Krzysztof Wołek, and Steve Rouse. His principal horn teachers include Dale Clevenger, Jeff Nelsen, W. Peter Kurau, Bruce Heim, Steve Causey, and Diana Morgen.
A GREAT RUN
KENTUCKY SHAKESPEARE WINDS UP LONGEST SEASON IN HISTORY WITH THREE EPIC MAIN STAGE PERFORMANCES
he Bard has left the building! Well, at least for this summer. The 2022 Kentucky Shakespeare Festival in Central Park delighted Louisville audiences with classic main stage plays and more. The 11-week season featured 60 performances in six productions, all offered free of charge thanks to generous donors.T Main stage performances included Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s classic romantic comedy of mistaken identity. The reimagined show was set in 1920s New Orleans and featured a live jazz band onstage. It was followed by Richard III, the tale of a charismatic, power-hungry villain and the cataclysmic end of England’s greatest power struggle, the Wars of the Roses. The Merry Wives of Windsor, a hilarious Elizabethan farce featuring the lovable Sir John Falstaff, rounded out the summer season. As you can see from the photos, the atmosphere was family friendly and festive as we celebrated Kentucky Shakespeare’s 62nd season!
Scenes from The Merry Wives of Windsor. Photos by Zachary Burrell.
UPCOMING PERFORMANCES
SHAKESPEARE'S R&J
Adapted by Joe Calarco Directed by Matt Wallace August 18-27 Henry Clay Theatre, 604 S. Third St Tickets: $25 kyshakespeare.com/season/rj Joe Calarco’s R&J re-imagines the classic story of history’s famous doomed lovers as a modern coming-of-age tale in this co-production between Kentucky Shakespeare and Pandora Productions, Louisville’s theater dedicated to telling stories of LGBTQ+ communities. The play explores forbidden love, vulnerability, and burgeoning sexuality as students at a repressive all-male school discover a banned copy of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They steal into the night to recite the prohibited tale of adolescent passion and find themselves immersed in the story that begins to blur with their own lives as truths emerge.
ENTER GHOST. AN IMMERSIVE HAUNTED HAMLET EXPERIENCE
By Diana Grisanti and Steve Moulds Directed by Matt Wallace October 5-30, shows nightly at 7 and 9PM Kentucky Shakespeare, 616 Myrtle St. Tickets: $25 kyshakespeare.com/season/enterghost Continuing our tradition of a site-specific production for Halloween, Kentucky Shakespeare presents an immersive new experience insider our Old Louisville headquarters. Utilizing silent disco headphone technology, audience members will travel throughout an interactive experience inspired by Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
