Dallas, TX (July 22, 2025) -- A team of Dallas-based creatives will present a workshop of the brand-new musical THE PENUMBRA at the Bath House Cultural Center on August 20 and 21, 2025 at 7:30 pm. A combination of student and professional actors and musicians will perform the new musical, with music by composer/lyricist Ian Ferguson and libretto by writer Lauren LeBlanc. Admission is free and open to the public.
Though it’s not been performed publicly yet, THE PENUMBRA is already earning local acclaim as the 2025 grant recipient of the Donald Fowler Theatre Arts Memorial Fund, which awards seed grants to DFW artists who are creating innovative works of theater. The grant, named for a beloved member of the DFW theatre community, chooses one recipient per year by a committee of industry peers.
Based on LeBlanc’s unpublished young adult novel of the same name, THE PENUMBRA is a supernatural thriller told in a three-part narrative: a teenage girl in a struggling family, a town reeling from an escalating pattern of missing children, and an ancient folktale of love and destruction.
Patron Magazine said, “THE PENUMBRA appears to approach (familiar themes) with specificity and sharpness, grounded in lived experience rather than abstraction. The musical grapples with grief and identity without the gauze of metaphor: this is trauma before adolescence fully forms, where monsters might be real and even the grownups are afraid.”
The creative team comprises an experienced group of DFW theatremakers: Sasha Maya Ada Davis (Second Thought, Altr’d Playhouse) will direct; Cody Dry (UTA, Dallas Theater Center) will music direct and conduct the live orchestra; Leah Mazur will design (UTA, Circle Theatre, Dallas Theater Center); and Jenny Dang (Broadway Dallas, Dallas Theater Center) will stage manage. In addition to youth performers from Dallas and Collin counties, the cast includes Denise Lee (Uptown, Dallas Theater Center), Jeremy Landon Hays (Broadway: Phantom of the Opera, Les Miserables), Finlay Stevenson (Theatre Three, Penguin Random House), Aubrey Ferguson (Theatre Three, Circle Theatre), and Sydnie Roy (The Today Show, Off-Broadway: The Pit). Licensed therapist and Second Thought Theatre Artistic Director Carson McCain will lead a free talkback after each performance.
For more information about The Penumbra, visit whatisthepenumbra.com or instagram.com/penumbramusical.
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