LADY M
11.6.25 at 7:30pm
Coffey St Studio
Anthime Miller, Composer
Colton Pometta, Librettist
Teresa Castillo, Lady M
Haunted by the loss of her child – “I have given suck, and know how tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me” – Lady M turns her grief into ruthless ambition. She calls upon the witches and drives her husband toward murder, seizing the crown for them both. As their reign descends into tyranny, Lady M is tormented by visions of her dead child and the blood she cannot wash away. Her unraveling peaks in a sleepwalking aria as she drifts into her child’s nursery. Grief and guilt overtake her – the cost of her ambition.
All of the text in this production comes directly from Shakespeare – what changes is the lens. By leaning into a detail that’s often brushed past – Lady M’s grief as a mother who has lost a child – her words ring with new resonance, and we see how ambition and loss are bound together in her undoing.
The End of the World and You: Health, Happiness, and Your New Life at Sea
11.7.25 at 5pm
Coffey St Studio
Louis Barker + Jack Beal, Composers
Emma Lea Hasselbach, Libretto + Dramaturge
Brian Mummert, Composer + Librettist
with ChamberQUEER + Alkemie Ensembles
The End of the World and You is an orientation session for novice seafarers at the end of the world. In this immersive, participatory performance, we present a combination of songs and instrumental music (both new and traditional) to focus an uncommon lens on the forthcoming climate tragedy: one that acknowledges grief, of course, but also highlights possibilities of adaptation and hope. The experience models a collective response to tragedy and disaster which centers on resilience through community, storytelling, and absurdity. Participants will be fully immersed in an environment where they can have the actual firsthand experience of the community-building and storytelling virtues the piece extols.
The key artistic collaborators for this project are Big Stubborn Boy (Lou Barker & Jack Beal, composing and performing), Emma Lea Hasselbach (scripting and dramaturgy), Brian Mummert (scripting and co-composing), Matthew Barker and Justin Barker (additional writing and illustration). Additional curatorial and production support, including possible expanded performing forces, will be drawn from ChamberQUEER, Alkemie, and the New York Folk Society.
HOMO ERECTUS
11.9.25 at 7pm
Coffey St. Studio
A.S.S. (Jake Brasch + Nadja Leonhard-Hooper), writers + composers
The third musical from American Sing Song (A.S.S.), HOMO ERECTUS is about a man who, after the death of his husband, attempts to travel back in time to reunite with his beloved…and accidentally travels way too far back, to the Paleolithic Era.
” A.S.S. is a theatre collective of two queerdos (Jake Brasch and Nadja Leonhard-Hooper) who write and perform epic, impossible musicals that can (and should) only exist in your mind. We’re after impossibly epic, positively filthy, and disarmingly sweet stories. We aim to create canvases in which butt jokes and earnest examination of social ills can exist on the same plane.
Homo Erectus is not JUST about gay boners; it’s also about attention. It’s our way of looking at technology addiction, our disconnection from each other, and our steady collective march into brain rot. It’s also about raising children in our broken world and the delusion/power of hope. It’s about the raw sexual power of fishing for one’s dinner. It’s about freaky ancient cave art. It mines the past and the future to illuminate the slipperiness and fragility of the present. We are leaning heavily on Bulgarian polyphonic singing as we create our new score. While our previous two musicals have been about the bops, we think this one wants to push closer to operetta. The music also feels environmental. So does the foley work. We are curious about only using organic materials to create sounds – such as twigs, flowers, rocks, and water. We’re after a singular strangeness, sadness, and slapstick madness. She is unlike anything we’ve made before and we are so excited to birth her.”
–A.S.S.
The Series
[working titles] is our program featuring works in development of opera and music theater. Featuring original projects in various states of development, the series invites audiences to join in as a critical part of the artistic process through preview performances, open working rehearsals and talk-backs.