Theater News

New Musicals From David Yazbek and Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong Set for Atlantic Theater Company

Legendary director Harold Prince will helm Yazbek’s ”The Band’s Visit”, while Armstrong contributes songs to Rolin Jones’ ”These Paper Bullets!”

Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong contributes songs to the new musical These Paper Bullets!
Green Day's Billie Joe Armstrong contributes songs to the new musical These Paper Bullets!
(© Tristan Fuge)

Atlantic Theater Company has announced its 2015-16 season at the Linda Gross Theater and Atlantic Stage 2.

First up is a revival of Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine. Directed by Churchill's frequent collaborator James Macdonald, the landmark drama about power, politics, sex, and Queen Victoria will have its first major New York revival in 30 years beginning in the fall.

Next up, in November-December, is the New York premiere of the new musical These Paper Bullets!, written by Pulitzer Prize finalist Rolin Jones and featuring songs by Grammy-winning Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong. Directed by Jackson Gay, this riff on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing follows a fab-four music group from Liverpool whose former drummer is out to destroy them. A coproduction with the Geffen Playhouse, the musical premiered at the Yale Repertory Theatre in 2014.

Spring 2016 will see another musical at the Linda Gross Theater, the world premiere of David Yazbek and Itamar Moses' The Band's Visit. Directed by 21-time Tony Award winner Harold Prince, the work is based on the film by Eran Kolirin and tells the story of an Egyptian Police Band sent to the middle of the desert after a mixup at the Israeli border.

The world premiere of Dominique Morisseau's Skeleton Crew follows at Atlantic Stage 2 in January 2016. The final installment of Morisseau's Detroit trilogy, the drama follows a family of workers at the last exporting auto plant in the city as they navigate the possibility of foreclosure. In May-June 2016, Atlantic Stage 2 will see the New York premiere of Adam Rapp's The Purple Lights of Joppa Illinois, which premiered at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in 2014. Rapp directs his work, about a man who must confront his tragic past when a pair of teenage girls arrives at his doorstep in Kentucky one autumn afternoon.