Where better to go at the end of our Season of Virtue than the source…of its opposite?  Our final mainstage production brings us face to face with the Devil.  It also brings us to the source of many a classic American tale: Washington Irving.  And it brings together three Metropolitan creators, working together for an all new celebration of theater, storytelling, and a good old fashioned, anti-puritanical hoe-down.

THE DEVIL—Evil, temptation, dalliance, sin… wickedness has a long literary and cultural history, no matter what you read or where you’re from.  And when we try to grapple with our baser impulses, humans imagine them in all sorts of forms.  From imps to spirits to witches, from jinxes to hexes to omens, from animals to zombies to miscreant dolls, we look far and wide (and occasionally in ourselves) to find someone or something to blame when things don’t go right.

Set in 1787, The Devil and Tom Walker’s titular hero (Tom, not the other one), hasn’t very far to look to find sin.  In his town of thrift, industry, fidelity, and fellowship, he stands out as miserly, slothful, irreverent, misanthrope.  He is, in short, the perfect client for the Devil, who approaches him with a familiar bargain:  in return for a pirate’s horde of riches, Tom need only provide the Devil with his immortal soul.  Tom is reluctant: the bargain sounds like a lot of work. But when that great Negotiator presents Tom with a surprise gift, the contract is signed, and a very funny yarn (with a surprising moral to boot) spins out.

In Irving’s tale, Tom enjoys a lucrative career as a usurer, but in the end has some misgivings.  “Having secured the good things of this world, he began to feel anxious about those of the next.”  He isn’t the first, nor the last to be sure, to learn that going back on a deal with the Devil leads right to place you were already headed….

This new musical is as merry as it is tuneful, with a truly magical staging to buoy the story along.  And without straying from Irving’s original from 1824, this version shows that Tom Walker’s legacy makes today’s headlines.

Metropolitan is delighted to bring the creative inspiration of three exceptional artists to create a new version of the tale for the stage.

 
photos: Michael Jerome Johnson and Erik Gratton by Steven Lembark
Michael Durkin, Justin Flagg and Sarah Hund, and Michael Jerome Johnson by Michelle DeBlasi

Yvonne Opffer Conybeare conceived the production, and her work on Metropolitan’s stage will be well known to our audiences.  In addition to many festival works, she was the director behind The City, Inheritors, The Devil’s Disciple, and The Truth, and her staging of Missouri Legend still sings in many an audience member’s ears, as she filled that delightful telling of the Jesse James story with old-time music.
Anthony P. Pennino, author of Devil and Tom, has penned many scripts premiered at Metropolitan.  His Children’s Crusader pithily and poignantly told the story of Florence Kelly’s intrepid career as a social reformer.  Extracts from Adams Diary, and Misty Phantoms were parts of our Twainathon and Hawthornucopia festivals, and he has made numerous contributions to our new play festivals, including the East Village Chronicles series, which he conceived.  His other full length works are also widely published and performed internationally.


Almost new to our stage is the composer and instrumentalist, Rob Kendt. Winner of a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award nomination for An Appalachian Twelfth Night (Dancing Barefoot Productions, 2003), he has worked as a theatrical composer with Cornerstone Theatre Company, The Evidence Room, and The Classical Theatre Lab. As a singer/songwriter, he has released two albums—I Hope It’s Me (2002) and I’m Not Sentimental (2007).


Metropolitan artists and audiences have rare luck: again and again we find that America’s past turns up marvelous and insightful stories for our present delight.  The Devil and Tom Walker is the most delightful of the season, and we look forward to a wicked good time.