The Bridge Stage of the Arts

The Bridge Stage of the Arts, Inc. (The Bridge) is an American theater company based in New York City. It was incorporated by its Artistic Director, Avra Petrides, in 1980; and has produced American/International music- theater festivals in the South of France (Languedoc-Roussillon region) with American musical-theater artists such as Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist and librettist of My Fair Lady, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green screenwriters and lyricists of Singin' In The Rain. These artists performed and also gave master classes on musical theater to lyricists, librettists, playwrights, composers, directors, and performers from all over the world. In Lower Manhattan The Bridge has presented Performance-Forums in which theater artists collaborate on productions with astrophysicists, philosophers, architects and others working in a variety of disciplines. Also, in Lower Manhattan, The Bridge produced Hart & Hammerstein Centennial Plus One which re-introduced Castle Clinton as a noteworthy performance space.

The purpose of The Bridge is to further collaborative creation of new theatrical hybrids by spanning different disciplines, cultures and generations; and to provide educational programs in the performing and visual arts.

In the South of France, The Bridge presented Alan Jay Lerner and Liz Robertson In Concert, Honi Coles and The Copasetics In Concert, and Betty Comden and Adolph Green In Concert. In Lower Manhattan, The Bridge has produced its Performance-Forums with astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson, theater director, Tom O'Horgan and others. And in June 2001, it presented Hart & Hammerstein Centennial Plus One at Castle Clinton, near the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The production was the first of a summer concert series, and marked the first time in 146 years that Castle Clinton had been used as a theater. Castle Clinton, a 206-year-old circular stone garrison built in 1811 to protect New York from the warring British, has served as an indoor garden, an opera house, an aquarium, an immigrant landing depot, and the setting in which the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind made her 1850 American debut, courtesy of P.T. Barnum; also, in recent years, as a ticket booth for ferries to the Statue of Liberty.