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Professor Woland's Black Magic Rock Show
Music: Michael Pemberton
​Lyrics: Michael & Andrea Pemberton
Book: Jesse Rasmussen & Elizabeth Dinkova

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March 20 - April 13, 2025

Cabaret Table & Regular Seating
Pay-What-You-Can: March 20, 21 & 23

WORLD PREMIERE
Director: Elizabeth Dinkova
Music Director: Marika Countouris
Featuring Marika Countouris, Jeremy Allen Crawford, Oliver Dyer, Camilo Linares, Stephen Russell Murray, Danny Santiago, Fran Tapia, Jordyn Taylor
NOTE: Marika Countouris (Performances thru April 6 only). Lauren Janoschka (Understudy for Ms Countouris/Music Director Sunday matinees and April 3-6 performances)

​SCAN QR CODE FOR DIGITAL PROGRAM, DRAMATURG NOTES & BIOS

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Written during the darkest days of Stalin’s reign, and banned for decades, Bulgakov’s “Funny, devilish, brilliant satire”* The Master and Margarita became a literary phenomenon with a cult following. In this new musical retelling, a band of dissident rock musicians (or perhaps the demonic retinue of Satan himself) visit 1930s Moscow to expose social climbers, bureaucrats, and profiteers. The Master—an idealistic writer working on a novel about Christ and Pontius Pilate—is silenced and detained in an asylum. Margarita, his collaborator and lover, embarks on a journey through heaven and hell to save him and his manuscript.
 
This fantastical, wildly comedic political satire celebrates love that defies all odds, the interplay of good and evil, and the freedom of the spirit in an unfree world. This rock musical channels the resistance of artists in totalitarian states across the globe. Fans of Hadestown and Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 – belly up to the stage!
*Publisher’s Weekly

Running time: approx. 2hours plus one intermission.

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Michael Pemberton (Music & Lyrics) is an award-winning actor, singer, and songwriter with a career that spans over 30 years in New York City and beyond with credits on over 50 television and film roles, and countless stage productions around the country and on Broadway. He started writing original lyrics and music in earnest when he moved to NYC in 1994. The city inspired many of his early songs, providing a rich display of humanity that compelled him to tell in song some of the stories he witnessed and experienced. The Michael Pemberton Band, formed in the late 90s, played in many of the top indie venues in NYC, including Joe’s Pub, The Bitter End, The Bottom Line, Club El Flamingo, CBGB’s Gallery. His song “Rollercoaster/ Carousel” was recorded and released by Actor/Singer Sara Ramirez and performed on a Ted Talk filmed at New York’s storied Town Hall. This is his first full-length rock musical.

Andrea Pemberton (Lyrics)
 
Jesse Rasmussen (Book) is a writer, director and lyricist from Australia, currently based in Brooklyn and Maine. Jesse received her MFA in Directing from the Yale School of Drama and has directed works by Jeremy O.Harris, Tori Sampson and Sarah Mantell at Ars Nova, PSNY, the Yale School of Drama and Yale Rep. Jesse is a founding member of LA based avant-garde opera company Four Larks and has collaborated with the company on numerous projects as writer, librettist and lyricist on operatic works staged at the Getty Villa, The Wallis Annenberg Center and The Malthouse Theatre (Australia). Current projects include: Medea In Exile, a contemporary adaptation of Medea by Australian playwright Tom Holloway and Dr. Emma Cole, with music director Lukas Papenfusscline, and a baroque pop cabaret based on the fiction of Anais Nin (Nin Descending a Staircase) with composer/co-creator Ellen Warkentine. Jesse is also a Co-Director & Co-writer for feature film project Syrena, supported by the Midnight Oil Collective/Tsai Center for Innovation at Yale.

Elizabeth Dinkova (Director/Book/Artistic Director) is a Bulgarian director, adaptor, and collaborative creator who explores alternative realities at the intersection of theater, film, and music in pursuit of communal transformation. In 2021-22, she was an Associate Artistic Director of 7 Stages Theatre, Atlanta's hub for boundary-pushing international theater. She is an alum of the Alliance Theatre’s Artistic Leadership fellowship, the Studio Theatre's Artistic Apprenticeship, and a recent graduate from the MFA Directing program at the Yale School of Drama, where she served as a Co-Artistic Director of the Yale Summer Cabaret and received the Julian Milton Kaufman prize for Directing. Recent projects include Spooky Action’s Sonnets for an Old Century and workshop of Syrena, the visual album TIT, inspired by Titus Andronicus and co-written with Jesse Rasmussen, at the NYC Indie Theatre Film Festival, Rage, a play with music adapted from Stephen King, at Quinnipiac University, The Seagull at Serenbe Playhouse, and the opera Orfeo ed Euridice at Bel Cantanti Opera Company. Elizabeth has taught acting, directing, devising, and musical theater at the Toronto Metropolitan University, University of California Riverside, Quinnipiac University, and Queens College CUNY.

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