New2NY Series

New2NY Series is not a single show but a set of three new musicals in development, each given a short run of staged concert presentations. The York Theatre produces it Off-Broadway at the Theatre at St. Jean's, on the Upper East Side. The titles follow one another in 2027: Sometimes Love opens the series in March, Nikola Tesla: The Forgotten Genius follows later that month, and All the Way Home plays in April. Each runs about nine days.

The format comes from Musicals in Mufti, the York's series of staged readings of older musicals, which began in 1993. Performers wear street clothes, with no full sets or lighting design, so the writing, the score and the storytelling come first. Because these are showcases of works in development, there is no opening night or press night, and no previews in the usual sense.

Sometimes Love is an original musical inspired by a true story that its subject told on stage at The Moth in a talk that went viral in 2017. Its heroine, Aryana, is a single woman in her forties with a grown daughter. She decides romance is no longer on the table and relocates abroad to focus on her art. There she falls for Gianluca, a free-spirited artist well her junior, and the musical follows what that relationship has to carry: desire, closeness, family and loss.

Nikola Tesla: The Forgotten Genius is drawn from the life of the inventor. It presents Tesla as both a mystic and a genius, and it centers on his struggle against Thomas Edison over how electricity would reach the world.

All the Way Home is told through an author's memory of a single childhood event that reshaped his life, with family, faith and love running through it. It is adapted from Agee's novel A Death in the Family and from Tad Mosel's play All the Way Home.

Michael Mott wrote the music and lyrics for Sometimes Love, and Robert Lindsey-Nassif wrote the book, music and lyrics for Nikola Tesla. For All the Way Home, Stephen Flaherty wrote the music and Lynn Ahrens the lyrics. When Asolo Repertory Theatre staged that musical as Knoxville, its score was advertised as a blend of folk, bluegrass and ballads.

New2NY began while the York was based at St. Peter's Church, where it performed from 1993 to 2020. Several titles have gone on from the series. In Transit played Off-Broadway in 2010 and opened at Circle in the Square on December 11, 2016, as the first Broadway musical performed entirely a cappella.

Agee's novel was published in November 1957 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1958, and Mosel's play won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1961. The musical opened at Asolo Repertory Theatre in Sarasota, Florida, as Knoxville on April 23, 2022, and was later reworked at Knoxville's Clarence Brown Theatre. The April 2027 run is its New York premiere under the new title.