Far From Heaven has a score by Tony Award-nominated Grey Gardens and Finding Neverland songwriters Scott Frankel (music) and Michael Korie (lyrics) and a book by Tony Award winner Richard Greenberg (Take Me Out).
Tony nominee Michael Greif (Grey Gardens, Rent, Next to Normal) directs the production that will run through July 29. Following the Williamstown preview production, Far From Heaven will be presented Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in spring 2013. O'Hara will also star in Manhattan. She is currently taking a break from Broadway's Nice Work If You Can Get It to work on Far From Heaven. She returns to Nice Work on July 31.
O'Hara (The Light in the Piazza, South Pacific, Nice Work...) stars as Cathy Whitaker, who has her world shattered through a series of revelations and emotional encounters. Pasquale (Reasons to Be Pretty, "Rescue Me") portrays her husband, Frank.
"If I had ever entertained any ideas of doing pastiche-period songs, Richard Greenberg was not into that at all," Korie told Playbill.com. "He took the stories completely seriously. So we went on the assumption that the music would take the place of the stylization and cinematography of the film. When we started writing songs, almost immediately that seemed to prove true. And when we did the first reading, the story just worked, and the music maybe even intensified it. It's a mostly-music musical — in a Rodgers and Hammerstein vein, where you take the characters seriously. You don't write genre cream-puff songs. You write from character."
photo by Joseph Marzullo/WENN |
Designing Far From Heaven are Allen Moyer (scenic design), Catherine Zuber (costume design), Kenneth Posner (lighting design), Nevin Steinberg (sound design) and Peter Nigrini (projections design). Larry Yurman (Grey Gardens) is music director and orchestrations are by Tony Award winner Bruce Coughlin (The Light in the Piazza, Grey Gardens).