New Yorkers gain a live, communal archive of city life as a 12-track project called Public Record is improvised at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park. The production opens for five nights and assembles material gathered over nearly a year of workshops and surveys that engaged about 350 people across the five boroughs. Creators Emily Lim and Dan Canham adapted a format they tested in Sunderland last year, bringing a project that began in the UK back into the orbit of the Public Theatre’s Public Works programme.
Lim framed the return as a completion of a cycle. “It’s very full-circle,” she said, and the New York staging deliberately shifts scale and ambition away from trying to capture an entire city. Canham, co-director and choreographer, warned that the show is not a straight remake. “It’s not just a remake, it’s a complete reinvention,” he said, describing a move toward amplifying distinct communities rather than summing the whole metropolis.
Playwright Lisa Sanaye Dring used the research to build a 12-track architecture intended to be modular and portable. Tracks organise testimony through civic and musical rubrics: Birth Certificate gathers origin stories, Karaoke repurposes pop standards, and After Dark celebrates nocturnal life. The final cast ranges in age from seven to 84, and Lim says the process began and ended with deep listening to participants.
The production foregrounds collaboration with local artists. For After Dark the team invited Papi Juice, a Brooklyn collective centred on queer and trans people of colour, to live mix the dance section. Oscar Nñ, Papi Juice’s resident DJ, produced the collective’s first complete song for the show, co-written and performed with Maya Margarita. “A queer dancefloor is something that is so important,” Nñ said, calling the piece clubby, romantic and longing. Music director Michael Thurber recruited musicians from across New York’s scenes, including Carnatic violinist Arun Ramamurthy and Louis Cato, who led the house band for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
The project also carries a revised approach to grief and remembrance. Sunderland’s Tribute Act honoured the late singer-songwriter Faye Fantarrow, who died in 2023 aged 21, and Lim says the New York version interrogates how different cities keep collective loss. Rehearsals debated emblematic songs, repeatedly circling Martin Scorsese’s theme New York, New York before accepting its cultural weight as the show’s love song.
Over five nights beginning Friday, the Delacorte run will test whether a sprawling, volunteer-driven ensemble can turn local testimony into a coherent live record and whether that record can function as a public archive. The creators present the 12-track model as a blueprint that can be adapted to other contexts, and the run will show whether that promise holds when a city’s stories are performed as a single, improvised album.
