Dream: A Freudian Musical, from Jonathan Larson Grant winner Daniel Emond (Kill the Whale), will play a set of performances at Joe’s Pub November 15 and 22. The evening is being music directed by JT Kaufman, and presented in partnership with YoungArts.
The dream-set show centers on Sabina Spielrein, a psychoanalyst with her own history of supposed “hysteria” who counted Carl Jung as a lover and Sigmund Freud a mentor. Press notes describe Emond’s score as blending the musical styles of “Joanna Newsom, Sam Smith, Wagner, Eminem, and everything in between.”
The cast will feature Ellie Barone (Hightown) as Sabina, Jordon Bolden (The Kill Room) as Jung, Emond (The Great Comet) as Freud, and Jo Lampert (Joan of Arc) as S. Spielrein. The evening will also feature special guest Samantha Pauly (The Great Gatsby).
The performance’s band will feature Rick Martinez on drums, Julia Henderson on cello, Trevor Brown on bass, and Odetta Hartman and Allie May on violin. Orchestrations are by Emond, and Joshua Henderson serves as associate music director.
“What began as a meditation on dreams, a subject which has captivated me since I was little, has carried me through the work of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Sabina Spielrein, all of whom who used the dreams and their latently divined meanings to explain a rapidly shifting modern world,” shares Emond in a statement. “In my first musical Kill The Whale, I threw every color of paint I knew against the wall to produce an epic and varied headbanger. The score of Dream is a different kind of tapestry—a score that plays as delicately with its themes, while manically it will suddenly turn, throwing its toys around in moments like Freud’s aggressive rap sections.”
Tickets are at PublicTheater.org.