Mary Bridget Davies had captured our hearts as the star of A Night With Janis Joplin and her Tony Nomination certified her place on Broadway. Davies channels her powerful focus on invoking Virginia Woolf.
‘Virginia Woolf’s essay on women’s struggle for independence and creative opportunity is a landmark of feminist thought.’(The Guardian)
A Room of One’s Own is both a landmark in feminist thought and a rhetorical masterpiece, which started life as lectures to the literary societies of Newnham and Girton Colleges, Cambridge, in October 1928. It was then published by the Hogarth Press in 1929 in a revised and expanded edition that has never been out of print. Now, it is a play with music starring Tony nominee (for her role as Janis Joplin) Mary Bridget Davies! Barely 40,000 words long, addressed to audiences of female students in the hothouse atmosphere of interwar creativity, this became an unforgettable and passionate assertion of women’s creative originality by one of the great writers of the 20th century. With the kind permission of The Estate Of Virginia Woolf, Armand & Paiva LLC will present a unique version of this classic text as a play with music! Paiva) specializes in music recording projects and stage shows. They’ve been involved with concert productions of Chaka Khan, The Manhattan Transfer and Broadway productions such as The Great Comet starring Josh Groban, Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along in LA and the upcoming Town Hall NYC debut of The Queen’s Six, in partnership with 12-time Tony-winning producer Carl Moellenberg. Our Director:
Director Kirsten Z Cairns is equally at home creating productions in traditional performance spaces, and exploring site-specific projects in a variety of venues. She is Artistic Director and Founder of Enigma Chamber Opera, established at the end of 2019. Their debut production of Britten’s The Turn of the Screw was hailed in the Boston Globe as ‘an auspicious arrival in the Boston arts landscape’; their Curlew River was described by reviewers as ‘expertly rendered’, ‘fabulously done’ and ‘a transcendent experience’. Enigma’s online production of The Impresario was nominated for Broadway World regional awards (Best Streaming Musical and Best Director of a Stream (professional)
Cairns has staged works throughout the US and in the UK; as Resident Stage Director for Intermezzo: The New England Chamber Opera Series, her productions included three world premieres. Her work has been described in the press as ‘so good you want to see it again, right away’ and ‘astounding, phenomenal, superb’. Before going freelance, Cairns was Director of Opera Studies at the Boston Conservatory, where she staged many productions of opera and theatre, as well as spearheading their very popular children’s opera series. Her further directing projects include work for The Crane School of Music at SUNY Potsdam, UMKC’s Conservatory, Longy School of Music, Dartmouth University’s Glee Club, Opera del West, Opera North, Trinity Church Boston, the Episcopal Chaplaincy at Harvard, Nonsense Room Productions, and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. With degrees from the University of Durham, the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and New England Conservatory, Cairns is a qualified instructor of drama and literature, and a trained singer. She has lectured for groups such as the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Duke University, MIT, and Boston Lyric Opera. She also performs for the Council for Music in Hospitals and Care, Scotland, specializing in giving concerts for dementia sufferers. Armand, a full-scholarship recipient from Berklee College Of Music and a protegé of the late Atlantic Records VP Arif Mardin (Bette Midler, Chaka Khan, Bee Gees) is Ms. Davies’ Music Producer and Manager. He took the idea of creating original music for the play to the Estate of Virginia Woolf in 2021. Armand was met with a positive response. He then recruited Broadway veteran Mark Berman (S*x and The City, Bullets Over Broadway) as a collaborator for the creation of original music, which would also evolve into being Ms. Davies’ upcoming new album! Guitar virtuoso Alex Prezzano also joined the team in 2022.
