FOX5 Vegas previewed the one-night-only concert reading of Bruce — and in doing so, gave viewers the clearest picture yet of what a Bruce musical Las Vegas audience was actually seeing: not a finished show, but a new work in development, in public, on its way up.
Bruce takes its name from the famously temperamental mechanical shark on the set of Jaws, and tells the story of that troubled production. The concert reading served two purposes at once: a fundraiser for THIRD Street, and a live demonstration of the model the campus is built around.
A concert reading of the new musical Bruce — about the filming of Jaws — serves as a fundraiser and a great showcase for what we want to do here at THIRD Street, which is incubating new work.
THIRD Street
Why a reading, and why in public
New musicals are not written so much as rewritten. A concert reading strips away sets and staging so the score and the book can be tested in front of a live audience — the cheapest, fastest way to learn what works. Cities with real incubation infrastructure do this constantly. Las Vegas, until now, has mostly had to send its writers elsewhere to do it.
What this looks like at scale
Once the campus opens, the 150-seat black box and the screening-room studios are designed to host exactly this kind of work on a regular schedule: readings, workshops, and pilots that give local writers, composers, and performers somewhere to fail productively before a full production is ever budgeted.
See what’s coming up, learn how the incubator works, or support new work so the next reading has a permanent home.
