Casting is now complete for the Olney Theatre Center's world premiere of the new musical Senior Class, presented in association with Kevin Duda Productions, Inc.
Directed by Amy Anders Corcoran with choreography by Emmy winner Karla Puno Garcia and musical direction by Dolores Duran-Cefalu, performances are scheduled for May 16-June 22 on the Roberts Mainstage in Maryland.
The cast will be led by Bradley Adam Stein as Colin, Jeffrey Cornelius as G.B., and Lauryn Adams as Aliz茅 with Quadry Brown, Wynter Nicole Cook, Mia Goodman, Ciara Hargrove, Angelo Harrington II, Santina Maiolatesi, Nico Nazal, Ashley D. Nguyen, Jacob Pelzman-Kern, Connor James Reilly, Russell Rinker, Alanna Sibri谩n, David Singleton, Taryn Smithson, Jordyn Taylor, Taylor J. Washington, and Gwynne Wood. Swings for the production are Ariel Kraje, Nat Mitchell, Haley Nachlas, and Bryan Stopak.
Senior Class features a book and lyrics by Melvin Tunstall III with music by Tunstall and Greg Dean Borowsky. The concept for the musical is by producer Duda, who proposed it to Tunstall while the two were in the Broadway ensemble of Beautiful - The Carole King Musical.
The new musical follows a high school theatre company that suffers budget cuts and can't pay for the rights to My Fair Lady. Two Broadway-obsessed students, G.B. (Cornelius) and Colin (Stein), decide to stage their own original musical version of Shaw鈥檚 Pygmalion, which
is in the public domain. The search for an actress to play their Eliza
leads them to Harlem-born-and-bred subway dancer named Aliz茅
(Adams), but
artistic egos and high school hierarchies threaten to undermine the
production.
鈥淏oth Melvin and I were in the ensemble for almost [Beautiful's] entire five-year run,鈥� Duda says about the genesis of Senior Class. 鈥淚 was having a lot of conversations around race, class, equal rights, and other social activism points. I really wanted to do something theatrical that incorporated all of these ideas and ideals. It occurred to me that My Fair Lady was a classic example of social structures and class systems. Strangely connected to that, my first show on Broadway as an actor was in the original cast of The Book of Mormon, and I was a fan of Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker]鈥檚 ability to deal with all of these very mature topics using the South Park kids. I thought about it for a while and then, one day at five-minutes-to-places for the show, just blurted out to Melvin, what if we did a contemporary retelling of Pygmalion but used students to reframe it and allow them to deal with these very elevated situations from their own, unique and very powerful point-of-view?鈥�
The creative team also includes orchestrator Sam Young, set designer Lawrence E. Moten III, costume designer Kendra Rai, lighting designer Colin K. Bills, wig designer LaShawn Melton, sound designer Kevin Alexander, and associate music director and conductor Christopher Youstra.
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