Worst News Ever

New Stage Collective, a theater I started volunteering with this season, will no longer be performing after this season.

From their website:

New Stage Collective, the award-winning contemporary theatre company on Main Street in Over-the-Rhine, announces it will close its final season with Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music. NSC Producing Artistic Director Alan Patrick Kenny music directs the iconic 1973 musical at Know Theatre. Wright State Musical Theatre Chair Joe Deer is guest director in his Cincinnati debut. The show features a large cast of talented Cincinnati actors including Amy Warner and Bruce Cromer in lead roles. A Little Night Music opens April 30 and runs for a limited run of 8 performances through May 10.

“A Little Night Music will serve as the swan song for New Stage Collective,” says Kenny, who co-founded the company with Joshua Steele in 2003. New Stage Collective announces the difficult decision to end its amazing, seven-season run after the final performance of A Little Night Music.

In a joint statement, the board of trustees said, “We are heartbroken by this painful, difficult decision to cease further operations. The severity of the economic downturn coupled with rapidly diminishing resources made producing another season impossible.”

“The support from the community has been spectacular throughout our company’s entire history,” says Alan Patrick Kenny. “Unfortunately, we are in a new economic reality. In the past we were able to present amazing works of theatre using incredibly talented artists and very few resources. In this new economic reality, the artistic ideas and the talent remain, but the resources do not. I feel we truly did everything we could to survive, but at the end of the day the board and I made the only responsible decision.”

I'm really, really upset by this news. Me and @jddalton went and watched Bent this weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it -- the point that the story line is still haunting me and shaking me up quite a bit. It was a great space, filled with great people, and had great performances. 

I'm really sad to see them go. Make sure you, too, say good-bye and see A Little Night Music.