Arts and Entertainment Sotto Voce to Come to Historic Asolo Theatre in April

SARASOTA — The Asolo Repertory Theatre's production of Sotto Voce, the Pulitzer Prize and Greenfield Prize-winning musical by Nilo Cruz opens Thursday, April 2 in the Historic Asolo Theater. The production will be directed by Melissa Kievman. It runs through Sunday, April 26, previews on Tuesday, March 31 at 7:30pm and Wednesday, April 1 at 8pm.

Sotto Voce premiered in February 2014 at New York’s Theater for the New City, and had a brief yet celebrated run the following month at Miami-Dade County Auditorium’s On.Stage Black Box theater. The title of Mr. Cruz's new work is an Italian musical term that means to speak in a soft manner with purpose.

Cruz captures the resiliency of true love and the power of memories in this spiritual masterpiece. German-born novelist Bemadette Kahn lost her one true love when he fled Nazi Germany aboard the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish immigrants seeking refuge in Cuba. Cuba and the United States tragically turned the ship away, leaving the ship's passengers to return to Europe where many perished in Nazi concentration camps. Her heartbreak resurfaces when a young Jewish Cuban writer contacts the now 80-year-old reclusive, lovelorn Bemadette to research the ship's ill-fated voyage.Their relationship slowly evolves into a transcendent romance based on her memories of the boy she never stopped loving.

Olivier Award-winning actress Kathryn Hunter, who was the first British female to ever professionally portray the title role in Shakespeare's King Lear, stars as the wistful Bemadette. On screen, Ms. Hunter played Arabella Figg in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. NYU Tisch School of the Arts CAP21 graduate Ben Rosenbach and Cuban-American stage and television actress Hannia Guillen star alongside Hunter.

Cuban-born Nilo Cruz was the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003 for his Tony-nominated play Anna in the Tropics. He crafted the Spanish translation for Asolo Rep's 2012 production of Hamlet, Prince of Cuba. In 2014 Mr. Cruz was awarded the prestigious Greenfield Prize and commissioned to write a brand new play, which will soon be read for the first time at Asolo Rep.

“Nilo Cruz is one of the great American playwrights writing today, and we are thrilled to present his gorgeous, poetic play, Sotto Voce, one of the most original pieces we’ve ever produced at Asolo Rep,” said Producing Artistic Director Michael Donald Edwards. “The galvanizing idea behind Mr. Cruz’s new masterpiece is the tragedy of the SS St. Louis but what it truly focuses on is the complicated and erotically charged relationship between the solitary Bemadette and the young Cuban writer desperate to meet her.”

Kievman previously directed Searching for Eden: The Diaries of Adam and Eve, and The Blonde, The Brunette and The Vengeful Redhead, and Expecting Isabel at Asolo Rep.