One shaft of light, an open pinstripe jacket, a face caught mid-thought. The first production photographs from Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen are out, just over two weeks before the new Duncan Sheik musical has its off-Broadway opening night.
Producers Kenny Kurokawa, RAYMAN and Antonio Marion released three images on Tuesday, shot in performance by Andy Henderson. They are the first look at a show that has been playing previews since Friday, September 25, and the first look inside the room it plays.
That room is The Night Egg at the Culture Club, at 530 West 27th Street, and it is brand new: the venue takes its name from the club in Moyoco Anno's manga, and the building is the one that housed the Twilo nightclub in the 1990s and, later, Sleep No More. Opening night is set for Thursday, October 15, and the production is booking through Sunday, January 3, 2027.
The wide shot is the one that tells you what the staging is: a gilt bed on a raked floor, the company strewn around it, follow spots cutting down through haze from the grid above. The audience is in the frame too, seated close enough to touch the bedposts.
Duncan Sheik, a two-time Tony Award winner and a Grammy winner, has written the music and lyrics, and Leah Nanako Winkler the book. Rob Ashford, who has won the Tony, the Olivier and the Emmy, directs and choreographs. Musical supervision and the vocal and incidental arrangements are by Or Matias.
The story follows Colette, a sharp young woman making her way in twentieth-century Paris, who takes work at a maison close called the Night Egg and starts writing down what she hears there. The confessions and appetites of the clients become her material, and the writing turns her from something looked at into the one doing the looking. What she cannot write her way out of is Léon, the childhood love whose pull on her keeps collapsing the difference between devotion and damage.
Sophia Anne Caruso, who originated Lydia Deetz in Beetlejuice, plays Colette, and Cory Jeacoma of Beautiful plays Léon. Nkeki Obi-Melekwe, who played Tina Turner in Tina, is Nana; Marc delaCruz, of Hamilton, is Sakae; and Drama Desk Award nominee Jenny Powers, of Little Women, is Madame. The company also includes Leanne Antonio, Kailin Brown, Alexa de Barr, Michael Everett, Elsa Keefe, Jaedynn Latter, Austin Lesch, Nika Lindsay, Caleb Marshall, Jessie Peltier, Michael Starr and Thomas Winter. delaCruz and de Barr joined the company shortly before previews began.
The design team is a heavyweight one for a room this size: three-time Tony Award winner Scott Pask on sets, eight-time Tony Award winner Catherine Zuber on costumes, Brian Tovar on lighting, Tony Award winner Cody Spencer on sound and Tom Watson on hair and wigs. Casting is by The Telsey Office / Patrick Goodwin, CSA.
The source is Anno's Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen, serialized in a manga magazine between 2013 and 2018 and later collected in two volumes. It took the Excellence Award at the Japan Media Arts Festival in 2020, and the production bills itself as the first Japanese manga adapted into an American musical in English.
Nobu Matsukura and Shin Yamada are executive producers, with Yu Anne Ando, Mika Furuya, Ryohei Otani and Yumi as associate producers. Wagner Johnson Productions is the general manager.
Tickets for Memoirs of Amorous Gentlemen at The Night Egg at the Culture Club are on sale for performances through Sunday, January 3, 2027.
