Every day is opening night.

Williamstown Theatre Festival & Paradise Blue Contact:
Rick Miramontez / Aaron Meier
rick@omdkc.com / aaron@omdkc.com
212 695 7400

Audible Theater Contact:
Chris Boneau / Michelle Farabaugh
cboneau@bbbway.com / mfarabaugh@bbbway.com

Jessica Shoffel / Dana Honor
shoffel@audible.com / dhonor@audible.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

“PARADISE BLUE”
WRITTEN BY DOMINIQUE MORISSEAU
DIRECTED BY RUBEN SANTIAGO-HUDSON

PRESENTED AS PART OF THE
WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL SEASON
ON AUDIBLE THEATER 

IS AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE
TOMORROW, MARCH 25 AT 3 AM ET
ON AUDIBLE PLUS

New York, NY (March 24, 2021) – The Williamstown Theatre Festival (Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director) and Audible Theater (Kate Navin, Artistic Producer) presentation of Paradise Blue is available worldwide tomorrow, March 25 at 3 AM ET within the Audible Plus catalog. Paradise Blue is part of the Williamstown Theatre Festival summer season produced on Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling.

Written by Tony Award^® nominee Dominique Morisseau and directed by Tony Award winner Ruben Santiago-Hudson, Paradise Blue features SAG Award^® nominee André Holland, Grammy Award^® winner Kristolyn Lloyd, Simone Missick, Keith Randolph Smith, and Emmy Award^® winner, Grammy Award winner, and 2020 Tony Award nominee Blair Underwood.

It’s 1949 in Detroit’s Black Bottom neighborhood, and there’s no better place to hear or play jazz than Paradise Club. Blue (Underwood), club owner and trumpeter, can wail like no other, but as forces outside the club conspire to irreparably change life inside and outside Paradise’s walls, he must decide whether to stay or sell. Beholden to his girlfriend (Lloyd) and fellow bandmates (Holland and Smith), Blue faces an uncertain future as he reckons with his troubled past. When Silver (Missick), a smooth and mysterious newcomer from Louisiana, steps onto the scene, everyone in Paradise must choose how to survive and if they can thrive.

Paradise Blue, the second play in Morisseau’s Detroit trilogy, had its critically acclaimed world premiere at Williamstown Theatre Festival in 2015.

The creative team also includes Bianca LaVerne Jones (assistant director), Darron West (sound design), and Kenny Rampton and Bill Sims Jr. (composers).

Paradise Blue’s running time is approximately two hours.

Special access to all seven titles in the WTF Season on Audible is available to eligible WTF donors; visit www.wtfestival.org/support for more information.

Forged during and in response to a fraught moment in history, the unprecedented collaboration between Williamstown Theatre Festival and Audible Theater preserves the Festival season in a different format, provides continued work for the artists involved in the Festival season, and produces a body of work that will be made available for global Audible listeners to enjoy and experience. It also marks the first time that a theatrical season of work will be produced on Audible.

Following tomorrow’s release of Paradise Blue will be Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here on Thursday, April 1, and the new musical Row with a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes on Thursday, April 8.

The other four titles in the season, the Tennessee Williams masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler, Animals by Stacy Osei-Kuffour, and Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club by Shakina Nayfack, are all available now within the Audible Plus catalog.

ABOUT WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL

Few institutions have as profound an impact on the American theatrical landscape as the Tony Award-winning Williamstown Theatre Festival. For over six decades, Williamstown Theatre Festival has brought emerging and professional theatre artists together in the Berkshires to create a thrilling summer festival of diverse, world premiere plays and musicals, bold new revivals, and a rich array of accompanying cultural events.

In response to the unprecedented challenges of 2020, Williamstown Theatre Festival continued its long history of artistic innovation, collaborating with Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling. The Festival’s initiative ensured the voices of artists could be heard loudly and clearly around the globe during an extraordinary moment when theatre’s power to inspire, move, and heal was most needed. The result – the WTF Season on Audible – is a complete collection of new and reimagined works defined by artistic excellence, cultural diversity and relevance, and unbounded reach and crafted by some of the most influential and provocative American theatre artists of today.

For 67 years, artists have been drawn to Williamstown Theatre Festival to make great theatre in an environment conducive to artistic risk-taking. Matthew Broderick, Audra McDonald, Dominique Morisseau, Mary-Louise Parker, Susan Stroman, Uma Thurman, and Blair Underwood are just a few of the luminous theatre artists who have worked at the Festival. Many others, including Chris Pine, Kate Hudson, Paul Giamatti, Allison Janney, Brie Larson, George C. Wolfe, and Kiefer Sutherland, began their careers at the Festival.

In addition, Williamstown Theatre Festival continues to grow new programs. Among the thriving new initiatives are COMMUNITY WORKS – a one-of-a-kind community-engaged theatre program – and the Andrew Martin-Weber New Play and Musical Commissioning Program, through which new work is created year-round by theatre artists including Jocelyn Bioh, Nathan Alan Davis, Halley Feiffer, Justin Levine, Matthew Lopez, Jiehae Park, Benjamin Scheuer, and many others.

Productions and artists shaped at the Festival fill theatres in New York City and around the world. In the abbreviated 2019-20 theatrical season alone, Williamstown Theatre Festival was represented or scheduled to be represented on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and regionally by The Sound Inside and Grand Horizons, both of which received Tony Award nominations for Best Play, The Rose Tattoo, Seared, Selling Kabul, Unknown Soldier, Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow, and Lempicka. Cost of Living, which was developed and premiered at Williamstown Theatre Festival, was awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Learn more about Williamstown Theatre Festival at www.wtfestival.org

ABOUT AUDIBLE THEATER

Audible Theater makes outstanding performances and powerful storytelling available to millions of people all over the world. As part of this initiative, Audible has produced Girls & Boys with Carey Mulligan, The Half-Life of Marie Curie with Kate Mulgrew, Harry Clarke starring Billy Crudup, Billy Crystal’s Have A Nice Day with Annette Bening and Kevin Kline, the revival of Aasif Mandvi’s Sakina’s Restaurant, and many others at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. In May 2018, Audible announced that the Minetta Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village will serve as its creative home for live performances in New York. Audible hosts and produces a wide variety of live performances at the Minetta Lane including dramatic plays, comedic shows, engaging panel discussions, and more, with Audible members receiving exclusive access to discounted tickets and related audio content.

Audible was co-producer for the Broadway transfer of the Tony Award-nominated Latin History for Morons written by and starring John Leguizamo and for Sea Wall /A Life starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Sturridge. The initiative also saw the release of John Lithgow’s Stories By Heart, Judith Light’s All The Ways To Say I Love You, Sharon Washington’s Feeding The Dragon, and more. Since June 2017, Audible has commissioned 40 theater playwrights to receive support from its $5 million Emerging Playwrights Fund dedicated to developing innovative English-language works from around the globe. The $5 million fund enables the creation of original plays driven by language and voice, keeping with Audible’s core commitment to elevating listening experiences through powerful performances and extraordinary vocal storytelling.

Audible, Inc., an Amazon.com, Inc. subsidiary (NASDAQ:AMZN), is the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling, offering customers a new way to enhance and enrich their lives every day. Audible content includes more than 575,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers.

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