Top Story — March: Asolo Rep to produce premiere of the musical 'Josephine'

Early jazz, entertainment and civil rights icon Josephine Baker will be making her way to Sarasota in a new Broadway-bound musical.

Scheduled to open in previews April 27 and to run through May 29, 2016, the Josephine Baker bio-musical titled "Josephine" will be the Asolo Repertory Theatre's spring musical as a part of their 2015-2016 season. Though the rest of the Asolo Rep's upcoming season will announced on March 16, the amount of talent and promise involved in this new production that has been in workshops in New York City since the summer of 2011 granted an early reveal. 

"We've never done anything like this," says Michael Donald Edwards, Asolo Rep's producing artistic director. "We wanted to isolate it from our season announcement. This is really special and the response from all our departments has been one of overwhelming excitement."

Edwards and the entire staff's excitement was palbable inside the Cook Theatre as the producing artistic director introduced the creative team and star behind the new musical to an audience of donors, press and theater enthusiasts. This world premiere production brings together a veritable juggernaut of a creative team.

The members of this musical Avengers include: two-time Tony Award-winning producer Kenneth Waissman who produced the original Broadway production of "Grease;" two-time Tony Award nominated director and choreographer Joey McKneely who recently staged the hit revival of "West Side Story" on Broadway; music from five-time Emmy Award nominee and three-time Grammy Award nominee Stephen Dorff who has written songs for Barbra Streisand, Madonna, Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson; Emmy Award-winning and Academy and Grammy Award nominated lyricist John Bettis who was a co-founder of the The Carpenters; book writers Ellen Weston and Mark Hampton; and the star of the project and playing the titular role of Josephine Baker is Grammy nominated and multi-platinum recording artist Deborah Cox whose previous stage roles include "Jekyll & Hyde," "Aida" and provided the vocal performance for Lifetime's recent Whitney Houston biopic "Whitney."

"Josephine Baker's story is one of rags to riches to a legend," says Waissman. "She goes from being a star diva to a woman who has seen death fighting for the French Resistance in Paris during World War II." Waissman and the entire creative team have plenty of material to use for the musical. Baker was the first African-American woman to gain world-wide fame for her dancing, singing and entertaining. This orignial triple threat became an international star at the Folies Bergere in Paris between 1939 and 1945, had an affair with the crown prince of Sweden Gustav VI, and after World War II, aided in the burgeoning American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s. 

"This is a role of a lifetime," says Cox. "It is tranforming and transcendent. Her story is a rich one that should be shared with the world." 

Though the show doesn't open for another year, the creative team and the entire staff and crew have already started pre-production work on the show. "Josephine" is a great addition to the regional theater's ongoing "American Character" project, whose goal is to distill the essence of what it means to be American. "Josephine Baker is a world figure," says Edwards. "And the world embraced her more fully than America did at the time. It's time to recognize her story, her person and her importance to the American Character."