The New York City Center Encores! 2023 season will feature Craig Lucas and Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza, Jerry Herman's Dear World, and Lionel Bart's Oliver!
The organization has also announced that Drama Desk winner Mary-Mitchell Campbell will be the new Encores! music director, stepping in as Rob Berman leaves the post following a 21-year tenure. Campbell, whose Broadway music direction credits include Big Fish, Finding Neverland, Mean Girls, The Prom, and this season's upcoming Some Like It Hot, will be the series' first female music director.
King and I Tony winner Ruthie Ann Miles will lead Piazza as Margaret Johnson in a production set to be directed Chay Yew, running February 1-5, 2023. Based on the novella by Elizabeth Spencer and featuring a book by Craig Lucas and a Tony-winning score by Guettel, The Light in the Piazza follows an American mother vacationing in Florence, Italy, with her daughter, who falls in love with a local man and forces her mother to embrace her own undreamt-of opportunities in the shadow of a tragic accident. Victoria Clark and Kelli O'Hara led the Broadway premiere of the work in 2005, with Clark winning a Tony for her performance.
Dear World, set to run March 15–19, 2023, will star Tony winner Donna Murphy as Countess Aurelia, who leads a motley band of outcasts to save their Chaillot neighborhood in Paris from a group of greedy bankers. Josh Rhodes will direct and choreograph. Based on Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot as adapted by Maurice Valency, the work features a score by Herman, including such songs as "Kiss Her Now" and "Each Tomorrow Morning," and a book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee. The work played a brief run on Broadway in 1969 starring Angela Lansbury in a Tony-winning performance.
The season closes with a two-week run of Oliver!, set for May 3–14, 2023. Encores! Artistic Director Lear deBessonet will helm the production, the work's first major New York production in nearly four decades. With a book and Tony-winning score by Bart, the musical take on Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist includes such favorites as "As Long As He Needs Me," "Where is Love?," and "Consider Yourself." The work premiered in 1960 on London's West End, where it went on to run for 2,617 performances, making the jump to Broadway in 1963 with future Monkee Davy Jones in the role of the Artful Dodger. A 1968 film adaptation, featuring Ron Moody reprising his West End stage performance as Fagin, won Best Picture at the Academy Awards. In the years since, the work has enjoyed a number of West End revivals, mostly via producer Cameron Mackintosh, but has not been seen in New York since a 1984 Broadway production, a remount of the original staging, starring Patti LuPone as Nancy.
The Encores! offerings join the previously announced New York City Center Annual Gala presentation of Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry's Parade, set to run November 1–6 in a production directed by Michael Arden and starring Micaela Diamond and Ben Platt.
