Michael Stewart

Nineteenth-century songwriter and vaudevillian Edward Harrigan and his partner Tony Hart were the first to integrate storytelling song and dance onstage. Here is their story told with an innovative blend of their songs stage performances and new material that captures their offstage relationship.

After escaping from the Republic s stronghold, Day and June are on the run in Vegas when the country learns that their Elector Primo has died and his son has stepped in to take his place. They meet up with the rebel stronghold of the Patriots a large organization straddling the line between the Republic and its warring neighbor, the Colonies and learn about an assassination plot against the Elector. Using threats and blackmail to get what he wants, the Patriots leader, Razor, convinces June to let herself be captured by Republic soldiers so she can win over the Elector and feed him a decoy assassination plan. But when June realizes that the new Elector is nothing like his father, she must work with Day to try to stop the Patriots plot before Razor can fulfill his own devastating plans.

Two months since the stars fell... Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright surveillance by agents unknown. Two months of silence while a world holds its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien when the alien doesn't want to meet? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees X-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised by grafts and splices that he no longer feels his own flesh. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed, and a fainter hope that she'll do any good if she is needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called "vampire," recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there, a conduit through which the Dead Center might hope to understand the Bleeding Edge. You send them all to the edge of interstellar space, praying you can trust such freaks and retrofits with the fate of a world. You fear they may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. But you'd give anything for that to be true, if you only knew what was waiting for them....

Everything changed the day a black dragon was born… Cassarah is trapped in the life of being a noble woman whose family is looked down upon. Why you may ask? Because they earned their title rather as payment, rather than being born to the privilege. On the day Cassarah goes to court, finally about to be accepted by society, fate takes the reins and lands her on the hot sands of the Dragon Roost during a hatching. When the black dragon chooses Cassarah and places his mark on her, they are bonded for life. Being claimed by this majestic creature is only the start of the adventure as secrets about her family's heritage come to light. Not only had her ancestors never been noble blood, they’d been mercenaries. A people who have been hunted down to the point of near extinction, but all that is about to change now that the black dragon has been born. Will Cassarah be able to shake off the shackles of her noble upbringing to be the savior these people need? Or will the lies and abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother keep her from spreading her wings?

The Palace Theatre under the direction of Messrs. Nederlander, David Black, Konrad Matthaei, and Lorin E. Price present Joel Grey in "George M!" a new musical, music and lyrics by George M. Cohan, book by Michael Stewart and John and Fran Pascal, lyric and musical revisions by Mary Cohan, musical supervision by Laurence Rosenthal, with Betty Anne Grove, Jill O'Hara, Bernadette Peters, Jamie Donnelly, Jacqueline Alloway, Harvey Evans, Danny Carroll, Gene Castle and Jerry Dodge, scenery by Tom John, costumes by Freddy Wittop, lighting by Martin Aronstein, musical direction and vocal arrangements by Jay Blackton, orchestrations by Philip J. Lang, production supervisor José Vega, original production directed and choreographed by Joe Layton.