Remember This Name...



Playwright Joe DiPietro stays busy. He certainly deserves the notoriety he receives in New York theatre circles. After all, his first musical comedy, I LOVE YOU, YOU’RE PERFECT, NOW CHANGE has been running there for more than 12 years and shows no sign of stopping.

Just recently, New Theatre audiences got a feel for Joe’s work with our hit summer musical ALL SHOOK UP (which sold out every performance with hundreds of wait list requests).

But it was our production of Joe’s worldwide theatre phenomenon OVER THE RIVER AND THROUGH THE WOODS (which ran six years in New York) that brought New Theatre to Joe’s attention. New Theatre favorites Marion Ross and Paul Michael starred in a production of Over The River…at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego. They called him afterward, introduced themselves to Joe and told him how much they loved the show. A friendship ensued. When Marion and Paul opened OVER THE RIVER here last year, Joe DiPietro flew out from New York to visit them. He announced at that time that he was writing a new play for them as a birthday gift to Paul.

“I’ve gotten to know them over the past three or four years,” Joe DiPietro said recently. “They’re lovely people and terrific actors and still have a desire to work in theatre, which I always respect. But it’s a little more pressure to write for someone because you want it to be good.”

The production you are about to see is not only the world premiere of Joe Dipietro’s THE LAST ROMANCE, it may be the only opportunity to see Marion Ross and Paul Michael, the couple for whom the play was created, in the starring roles!

This past August, The La Jolla Playhouse premiered DiPietro’s MEMPHIS, which follows the fictionalized story of a white disc jockey in the segregated south of the 1950s, who starts playing black music on the radio. It moves to Seattle this January with its next stop scheduled for Broadway.

Also slated for Broadway is DiPietro’s NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT, which boasts songs from the George and Ira Gershwin catalogue and will star Grammy and Emmy Award winner and Tony nominee, Harry Connick Jr. It starts previews in February 2009.

We are proud of our association with Joe DiPietro, one of the hottest commercial playwrights working today, and we’re proud to call him a friend. Remember his name. If you follow theatre, you’re going to hear it a lot. And if you follow New Theatre look for us to be first in line to make Kansas City Joe’s favorite place to introduce his new comedies.


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