BROADWAY RECORDS ANNOUNCES ‘BITTERSUMMER,’ THE NEXT ALBUM IN THE ‘AVERNO UNIVERSE’ SERIES
THE NEW FRONTIER OF LGBT STORYTELLING: QUEER STORIES, QUEER WRITERS, ALL-QUEER CHARACTERS & CAST
A Marvel Universe for Musicals? Meet Averno! Refreshing!” – The New York Times
(New York, NY – Wednesday, May 12th, 2021) Broadway Records announced today the release of the new concept recording of BITTERSUMMER. With a score by Annalise Emerick (Field Notes) and The Brother Brothers (Some People I Know), and book by Morgan Smith (Averno’s Willow and Over & Out), this album is the third release in Broadway Records’ long-term partnership with the creators of Averno, a fictional universe that lives across multiple media platforms. Profiled as “Refreshing!” and “A ‘Marvel Universe’ for Musicals” in The New York Times, Averno is a worldwide internet phenomenon where teens have found a safe haven in the times of quarantine. The album will be available on Friday, June 4th wherever digital music is sold and on BroadwayRecords.com.
In a world where being young and queer is too often staged only as struggle, BITTERSUMMER is a musical about joy. It is the story of four LGBTQIA friends, Quinn and Cam and Violet and Dahlia, and the home they make together in a clubhouse at the edge of the woods. It shows us their fashion shows and first kisses and secrets under wishing lanterns. It offers us those quiet truths of growing up that can only be found in precious unguarded moments surrounded by people who can see us and love as we are. When queer love is both exceptional and beautifully ordinary.
BITTERSUMMER is an unflinching look at the beauty, anguish, rage, and redemption in the lives of teenage girls who collide with the new American Gods. Spanning their last summer in Averno, BITTERSUMMER follows three best friends as they walk the boundary between our world and the Forest, between childhood and adulthood, between the homes they were born into and the ones they chose. They are set on an irrevocable path in which they collide with the ruling forces of Averno, past and present. Gods created in a blinding moment of rage, this American pantheon plays by new rules.
Produced by Smith and Michael J Moritz Jr, BITTERSUMMER features a cast of LGBTQIA+ artists including Janeen Garcia (Averno’s Over and Out), Jasmine Aurora Thomas (SheNYC Festival), Rachael Chau (Averno’s Willow), Richard Eyler (A Homosexual Hazard at Manhattan Rep) and Emma Freeman (Averno’s Willow).
In the fall of 2019, theatre artist and writer Morgan Smith created Averno – an immersive, interactive universe of interlocking musicals, comics, novels, and virtual reality centered around a single town in the south. When COVID-19 hit, the team expanded to include 60 other artists from 14 countries, including composers August Greenwood and Sushi Soucy. They shared one goal: create a form of theatre-oriented media that is not only producible in the COVID era, but that thrives in it. Since then, Averno has exploded into an online phenomenon, with over 100k followers across platforms, tens of thousands of participants in online events, and an international planning and development team formed to plan 13 musicals, as well as TV shows, films, comics, graphic novels, and fantasy series all set in Averno. With an innovative transmedia design approach that focuses on cross-platform expansion and truly immersive content, Averno has gripped the online-based arts industry and mainstream press (read NY Times feature here), creating a universe that fans have flocked to in a matter of months – and this is only the beginning.
“BITTERSUMMER has, in some ways, been in development for six months. In others, for six years,” says Morgan Smith. “It is, at its core, a story about growing up queer in the South, a story that I had to live to be able to write. The first draft of this show was born in November as a VERY messy play. I thought it should be a play, because there was truly only one artist I could imagine as the composer – Annalise Emerick. Known for Field Notes, a singer-songwriter album that became the soundtrack of the summer for indie kids, her music’s floaty ephemerality and gorgeous groundedness in its emotional depth was the only thing I could imagine scoring the script. So I wrote her an email. Shockingly enough, she said yes.”
Readers may sign up to receive an email alert when the album goes on sale at www.broadwayrecords.com/bittersummer-sign-up-list
The first album in the Averno Series, Willow, was released by Broadway Records in September 2020 and leapt to #7 on the Billboard Cast Album charts and has been streamed over 1.5 million times on Spotify. Over and Out (the second album in the Averno series) was released in January 2021 by Broadway Records and and shot to #11 on the Billboard Cast Album charts and debuted at #11 on the iTunes Soundtrack charts. Many more Averno cast recordings are in the works.
BITTERSUMMER Track List
1. Siren Song
2. The Story
3. Simple Life
4. Time of Day
5. The Sun and the Moon
6. This Love
7. Round and Round
8. Sidewalk Chalk
9. Runner
10. Twinkling Lights
Connect with Averno: website https://www.avernotownship.com / social media accounts (all platforms)
@avernotownship
Morgan Smith (they/them) is a writer and storytelling designer working to reimagine what a musical can look like- namely, forgetting about what makes a good musical and focusing instead on what makes a gripping story. They began their career with Oceanborn, an internet-famous musical about female Viking warriors called “sweeping and confident” by the New York Times, and went on to create the Averno Universe, a horror franchise about witches in the woods. Their shows in the Averno universe explore the supernatural, the politics of brutality, the power of rage, and madness. They have spoken at NY Comic-Con, SXSW, and DC Comic-Con, and studied at Juilliard, Yale, MIT, and NYU. They are 22. TikTok: @mythweaver_
Annalise Emerick, a self-starting, singer-songwriter, has been on the road virtually non-stop for nine years. Choosing to leave behind any semblance of a normal life for the day-to-day of a traveling independent musician was always a no-brainer for the Nashville spitfire. In 2011, Emerick released her first project, Starry-Eyed, to heavy critical acclaim after it debuted at #9 on the iTunes Singer/Songwriter chart. Three years after the release of her first EP, Emerick returned with Field Notes, a folk-inspired, markedly more mature turn for the singer that demonstrated just how much her endless days on the road and years of hard work fostered her growth as an artist and performer. In 2017, Emerick released The Right Heart EP, a collection of love songs, inspired by her 2016 marriage to her best friend from college. Emerick has toured extensively all over the US and Europe, playing 150+ shows every year since 2013. Insta: @annaliseemerick
The Brother Brothers are David and Adam Moss, identical twins born and raised in Peoria, Illinois, formerly based in Brooklyn, New York, but ultimately and profoundly shaped by indiscriminate rambling. They are the kind of people who have a story about everything, and moreso, one you might genuinely like to hear. Plopped atop virtuosic musicianship and enlivened by true blood harmonies, these stories come of an encompassing quality, stories one listens to time and time again, and eventually, holds as their own. The Brother Brothers’ astute, evocative music has earned an international audience, enthused nods from tastemakers including NPR, Billboard and Rolling Stone Country among others, support runs for acclaimed artists including I’m With Her, Lake Street Dive, Big Thief and Shakey Graves, coveted performance slots at Edmonton Folk Festival, Nelsonville Music Festival, FreshGrass Music Festival and beyond. Insta: @thebrotherbrothers
Broadway Records is the leading, Grammy® winning record label dedicated to releasing the most popular and current Broadway cast recordings, as well as preserving legacy musical theatre and theatre vocalists repertoire. Under the leadership of Broadway Records’ president and founder Van Dean, recent releases include: If The Fates Allow: The Hadestown Holiday Album, Lea Salonga Live In Concert with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Marguerite starring Cady Huffman, the Broadway star-filled Wellsongs Project, Legacy: Two Song Cycles by Ahrens and Flaherty, Georgia On My Mind with an all-star Broadway cast, the soundstage recording of Estella Scrooge, the Grammy® and Tony Award-winning revival of The Color Purple, the Tony Award® winning and Grammy® nominated revival of Once On This Island, the Grammy® nominated Matilda The Musical, Fiddler on the Roof (2015 revival) and My Fair Lady (2018 revival), Anastasia, Bandstand, Groundhog Day, The Lightning Thief and NBC’s television events, “The Wiz Live!” and “Peter Pan Live!”. The label’s critically-acclaimed “Live at Feinstein’s/54 Below” series features top Broadway stars including Patti LuPone, Aaron Tveit, Annaleigh Ashford, Norbert Leo Butz, Sierra Boggess, Laura Benanti, Emily Skinner & Alice Ripley, Adam Pascal & Anthony Rapp, Micky Dolenz and many others. Broadway Records has partnered with the Black Theatre Coalition to create Black Writers Amplified, an album consisting entirely of new works by Black musical theatre writers, a project to immediately take steps toward significantly increased representation of Black writers in musical theatre. Black Writers Amplified will be released in 2021 and act as a resource for artistic directors, producers and other theatre creators to find and support new voices and emerging Black talent. Broadway Records philanthropic endeavors also include the “Broadway For Orlando: What The World Needs Now is Love”, “We Are The World” by Broadway United and “Broadway Kids Against Bullying: I Have a Voice” music videos and From Broadway With Love benefit concerts for Sandy Hook, Orlando (Emmy Award for Sound) and Parkland. www.BroadwayRecords.com
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