Moonbox Productions is thrilled to announce that Jamaica Plain resident Michael Wartofsky along with his co-writer Kathleen Cahill will showcase the play, Late: A New Musical, at the first ever Boston New Works Festival.
Late is a musical and was written as a way to express the writer’s heartbreak about the murder of American school children through gun violence. Two weeks after a school shooting, nine teenagers return to class. In a theatrical style reminiscent of Our Town, they try to piece together the fragments of their last ordinary day together. With a contemporary sound inspired by musicals like Dear Evan Hansen and Spring Awakening, Late explores the students’ interconnected stories as they wrestle with identity, social pressure, love, grief, and memory.
Michael Wartofsky
The Boston New Works Festival will be a weekend long festival celebrating new original plays by local playwrights. The festival is taking place June 23-26 on five different stages at the Calderwood Pavilion and the Boston Center for the Arts.
Directed by Bridget O’Leary with music direction by Scott Nicholas, the cast of Late, A New Musical include: Lyric Lloyd (Billie), Liza Giangrande (Katie), Rose Koo (Makayla), Alex Goldman (Ryver), Luna Abreu-Santana (Charlotte), Benjamin Topa (Ryan), Brevan Collins (Beau), Nolan Montgomery (Vernell), and Ivan Cecil Walks (Cole).
Wartofsky is a songwriting professor at Berklee College where he established an undergraduate minor in Musical Theater Writing and won a Distinguished Faculty Award in 2018. His 2019 album, All the Possibilities: Broadway Sings Wartofsky on Yellow Sound Label features 12 breathtaking Broadway voices interpreting his original songs. Composer of Car Talk: The Musical!!! And Cupcake (Boston, 2012): music/lyrics for The Man in My Head starring Darius de Haas (NYC 2006): and music for Friendship of the Sea (North Shore Music Theater, 2003). Wartofsky earned an MFA from the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program.
“Seven original plays, performed on five different stages over the course of four days, I can’t believe the Boston New Works Festival is actually happening,” said producer Sharman Altshuler. “New works have been on Moonbox’s short list forever, but it wasn’t until COVID – with all of its undeniably disastrous ramifications – that we suddenly found ourselves with the time and space to finally dive in. We have always sought to staff and cast our shows exclusively from the local Boston community, and to be able to extend that commitment now to the support and showcasing of local playwrights and theater-creators is deeply exciting and gratifying."
Tickets are available at bostontheatrescene.com or by calling 617-933-8600. For a complete list of show dates and times please visit moonboxproductions.org.