Big River, The New Yorkers & The Golden Apple Slated for Encores! 2017

Encores! upcoming season will begin with Roger Miller’s 1985 retelling of Mark Twain’s classic novel, Big River, on February 8, 2017, followed by Cole Porter’s The New Yorkers. The Golden Apple, John Latouche and Jerome Moross’ whimsical reinvention of Greek epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, is set to close out the series' 24th year.

Big River nabbed a lucky seven Tony Awards the year it opened at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre in 1985 and was most recently revived on Broadway in 2003. A musical underdog as scrappy and restless as Huckleberry Finn himself, the show was created in the age of British spectacles by a quintessentially American artist—the beloved country-western singer Roger Miller—and his score is a blend of bluegrass, gospel, and honky tonk. Just over 30 years later, this tuner remains a compelling journey through 1840s America in all its beauty and savagery. Big River will play February 8, 2017 through February 12.

The New Yorkers will run from March 22, 2017 to March 26. Bullets fly and bathtub gin flows in this 1930 Prohibition jape, which is a gleefully amoral celebration of speakeasies, gangsters, society dames and the great city they love. The musical centers on featherbrained socialite Alice Miller, whose bootlegger beau leads her on a madcap romp from Park Avenue to Sing Sing and back again. The New Yorkers produced a number of standards—“I Happen to Like New York,” “Love for Sale”—but much of the original material has been lost, making this Encores!’s most ambitious musical reconstruction ever.

The Golden Apple is scheduled for May 10, 2017 through May 14. The whimsical and toweringly ambitious 1954 musical reshapes the myths of The Iliad and The Odyssey into an all-American fable that conjures up the days when pie-baking contests were cutthroat and lovers eloped in hot air balloons. Despite its brief run of 125 performances, John Latouche and Jerome Moross’ production was hailed by critics and introduced the classic torch song “Lazy Afternoon.”

Jack Viertel is the artistic director of Encores!; Rob Berman is its music director.