OBIE Winner A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant Gets L.A. Run and CD
By Ernio Hernandez
19 May 2004
Following its sold-out Off-Off-Broadway run and subsequent Off-Broadway transfer this winter, the newly Obie Award-honored musical A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant has announced a run in Los Angeles as well as a cast recording.
The work, featuring a cast of 8 to 12-year-olds, was presented by downtown company Les Freres Corbusier in New York. The Los Angeles run will be co-produced with and at the Powerhouse Theatre for an extended engagement, starting Oct. 15.
A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant is a self-proclaimed "bizarre new holiday classic — part avant-garde performance art, part children’s theater — based on the actual principles of Scientology and the seriously unbelievable life story of founder L. Ron Hubbard."
The musical, featuring a book, music and lyrics by Kyle Jarrow, based on a concept by director Alex Timbers, has the children actors portraying the religion's top advocates such as Tom Cruise, Kirstie Alley and John Travolta. The New York creative team will reprise their roles for the new run.
"We’re excited to take this production to the very center of the Church of Scientology – Los Angeles. Since the whole goal of the show is to imagine how the Scientologists might stage a nativity pageant, there’s no better place to try than in their Jerusalem," stated Timbers in a release.
The New York cast included Seamus Boyle, Spenser Lee Carrion-O'Driscoll, Alison Stacy Klein, Joshua Marmer, Max Miner, Stephanie Favoreto Queiroz, Daren Watson, Emma Whitfield, Sophie Whitfield and Jordan Wolfe. Casting for the L.A. run is yet to be announced.
Kurt Deutsch's Sh-K-Boom Records — who have recorded Broadway’s Amour and Off-Broadway’s Debbie Does Dallas and The Last Five Years — are already at work on a New York cast album. The projected release is this summer.
For more information on A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant, please visit www.lesfreres.org.
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