Across a Crowded Room Fellowship New Musical Presentation: Face to Face

Be among the first to experience a new musical comedy, Face to Face. How far would you go to avoid a meeting? When an overworked and undervalued employee turns down a request for a post-mortem, a chain reaction of epic proportions is set in motion, much to her chagrin. Navigating revolution, romance, and a whole lot of red tape, she quickly discovers that the office life she knew before has been changed forever. Face to Face is 90 minutes of absurdist musical comedy that satirizes work, commitment, and the burning desire to skip that meeting.

Face to Face came out of our Across a Crowded Room incubator program series. For more than a decade, the series at the Library for the Performing Arts has created a space for musical theater artists to meet, collaborate, and form connections. Since 2022, the Library for the Performing Arts has allowed program participants to apply for an Across a Crowded Room fellowship, which gives the artists money to develop their 20-minute musical works into 90-minute pieces. Please join us for a reading presentation of one such piece, Face to Face, by fellowship recipients Emily Drossell, George Luton, and Cameron Reese!

Photo Credit: Gabrielle Filloux.

SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to all, but registration is requested. Check-in line forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minutes before start time. Five minutes before the advertised start time, all seats are released, regardless of registration, to our patrons in the stand-by line. If you arrive after the program starts, you will be seated at the discretion of our front-of-house staff.

STANDBY LINE | If registration is sold out or has ended, do not fret! We welcome you to come to the Library regardless of registration status and wait in our standby line, which forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Five minutes before the program starts, all remaining seats are released. While this is not guaranteed, we will do our best to get you into any of our programs.

ASSISTIVE LISTENING AND ASL | ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing YWNjZXNzaWJpbGl0eSB8IG55cGwgISBvcmc=.

BRUNO WALTER POLICY | Please note that any unoccupied seat will be released five minutes before the show begins and holding seats for anyone beyond that is prohibited. There is no food or drink allowed inside the venue.

AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING | Programs may be photographed and recorded by and at the discretion of the Library for the Performing Arts and will post signs indicating as such. If you would prefer your image not be captured, please let us know and we can seat you accordingly. Attending any program indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any and all purposes of the New York Public Library.

PRESS | Please send all press inquiries to Alex Teplitzky at YWxleHRlcGxpdHpreSB8IG55cGwgISBvcmc=. Please note that all recording, including professional video recordings, are prohibited without expressed consent from the Library.

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