Every day is opening night.

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

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

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

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE, PLEASE

“ROW”
WORLD PREMIERE MUSICAL
BOOK BY DANIEL GOLDSTEIN
MUSIC & LYRICS BY DAWN LANDES
DIRECTED BY TYNE RAFAELI
INSPIRED BY A PEARL IN THE STORM BY TORI MURDEN MCCLURE

PRESENTED AS PART OF THE
2020 WILLIAMSTOWN THEATRE FESTIVAL SEASON
ON AUDIBLE THEATER

IS AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE
TOMORROW, APRIL 8 AT 3AM ET
ON AUDIBLE PLUS

New York, NY (April 7, 2021) – The Williamstown Theatre Festival (Mandy Greenfield, Artistic Director) and Audible Theater (Kate Navin, Artistic Producer) world premiere musical Row is available worldwide tomorrow, April 8 at 3am ET within the Audible Plus catalog. Row is the final production of the 2020 Williamstown Theatre Festival summer season produced on Audible, the leading creator and provider of premium audio storytelling.

Tonight, at the Williamstown Theatre Festival 2021 Gala taking place virtually, the company of Row will perform the opening number from the world premiere musical. To learn more about the 2021 WTF Gala, please call 212 395 9090 x 110 or visit gala.wtfestival.org.

Inspired by A Pearl in the Storm by Tori Murden McClure, Row has a book by Daniel Goldstein and music & lyrics by Dawn Landes, and is directed by Tyne Rafaeli.

Row’s cast features Kerstin Anderson, John Ellison Conlee, Nehal Joshi, Tamika Lawrence, John McGinty, Grace McLean, Kathryn O’Rourke, Lance Roberts, Sean Stack, and Sally Wilfert.

Tori (Grace McLean) aims to be the first woman to row solo across the Atlantic. As a child, she raised her younger brother Lamar (John McGinty), defending him against discrimination and neighborhood bullies. Now, with nothing but her body and a hand-built boat, she squares off with her own tormentor: the ocean. Inspired by A Pearl in the Storm by Tori Murden McClure, this uplifting world premiere musical, directed by Tyne Rafaeli with a book by Daniel Goldstein and music and lyrics by Dawn Landes, interrogates and reveals the resilience, fear, and ambition inside one individual undeterred by the odds.

The show’s creative team also includes Mary-Mitchell Campbell (music director), Emily Whitaker (associate music director), Daniel Kluger (orchestrator), Kai Harada (sound designer), and Candace Broecker-Penn and Christina Trunzo-Mosleh (ASL interpreters).

Row’s running time is approximately two hours.

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.

The other six titles in the season are all available now within the Audible Plus catalog: the Tennessee Williams masterpiece A Streetcar Named Desire, Photograph 51 by Anna Ziegler, Animals by Stacy Osei-Kuffour, Chonburi International Hotel & Butterfly Club by Shakina Nayfack, Paradise Blue by Dominique Morisseau, and Sanaz Toossi’s Wish You Were Here.

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.

For more information about Williamstown Theatre Festival, please visit www.wtfestival.org. For more information about Audible, please visit www.audible.com.

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 66 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 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 600,000 audio programs from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers.

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