Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik's The Nightingale Will Test Wings at La Jolla

By Adam Hetrick
06 Mar 2012

Duncan Sheik
Duncan Sheik
Photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN

Tony Award nominee Moisés Kaufman will stage The Nightingale, a contemporary musical adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale by Tony Award-winning Spring Awakening collaborators Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik, at the La Jolla Playhouse this summer.

Sater and Sheik have been developing the project with Kauffman (33 Variations, Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo, I Am My Own Wife) in recent seasons, including a 2011 summer presentation at the New York Stage and Film and Vassar College's Powerhouse Theater season.

La Jolla is joining in the development of The Nightingale as part of its Page to Stage Play Development Program. It will run July 10-Aug. 5 in the Sheila and Hughes Potiker Theatre.

Sheik and Sater also did early work on Spring Awakening at La Jolla prior to its acclaimed Broadway bow.

According to La Jolla, "The Nightingale tells the story of a young emperor in ancient China, whose luxurious but constricted life inside the walls of the Forbidden City is upended by the song of an extraordinary bird that lives beyond his reach."

Other works to come from the Page to Stage program at La Jolla include Peter and the Starcatcher, I Am My Own Wife, The Night Watcher, The Farnsworth Invention, Zhivago, 700 Sundays and John Leguizamo's Diary of a Madman.

Sheik and Sater's latest collaboration, Alice By Heart, which takes a page from the Lewis Carroll classic, is receiving its debut in a new venture from London's National Theatre, beginning March 8 at the Lyric Hammersmith and in youth productions across the U.K.

Visit www.lajollaplayhouse.org.