Bay Street Theater Pulls Back the Curtain on 2017 Mainstage Season

Bay Street Theater’s 2017 mainstage season has been announced, and it looks like patrons are in for another summer of exciting original work, contemporary favorites and beloved classics.

First up is The Man in the Ceiling, running from May 30–June 25. A new musical with a book by East End fave Jules Feiffer, music by Andrew Lippa and directed by Hamilton producer Jeffrey Seller, The Man in the Ceiling adapts Feiffer’s children’s book of the same name. In this musical comedy, Jimmy Jibbett wants to be an artist, but has to deal with being a disappointment to his father, stop daydreaming during school and get better on the ball field. Feiffer told Dan’s Papers earlier this year, “The ‘thing’ of the play is what everyone deals with from the time they’re young. I am still dealing with it—how to deal with your creative needs in a world that is often indifferent to them or misunderstands them…and how to just go on going on.” The Man in the Ceiling recently had a reading at Bay Street Theater’s New Works Festival.

Bay Street Theater Artistic Director Scott Schwartz directs the second production of the season, Intimate Apparel. Written by Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage, Intimate Apparel tells the story of Esther Mills, an African American seamstress who makes lingerie for society ladies and “ladies of the night” in 1905. The successful but lonely Esther has complicated friendships with the different women in her life, finds love with a Caribbean laborer working on the Panama Canal and makes an unusual friend in a Hasidic shopkeeper who shares his fabrics with her.

The season concludes with the William Shakespeare comedy As You Like It, directed by Tony Award winner John Doyle. In As You Like It, Rosalind flees persecution in her uncle’s court to the Forest of Arden with her cousin, Celia. Some of Shakespeare’s most famous passages are in As You Like It; audiences will no doubt recognize “All the world’s a stage!” This show is a co-production with Classic Stage Company in Manhattan.

Bay Street Theater and Sag Harbor Center for the Arts is located at 1 Bay Street, Sag Harbor. For tickets, subscriptions and more information, call 631-725-9500 and visit baystreet.org.