Like Father

Like Father is having its world premiere at the Hertz Stage at Alliance Theatre, with the full run opening October 8 and going through November 15. It's a coming-of-age musical set against America's true-crime obsession: seventeen-year-old Chris moves in with her estranged mother, Michelle, and stepfather, Ben, after her father is arrested. Then a hit true-crime podcast digs up the family's disturbing past, and the whole thing starts to unravel around them.

The show is built on a folk-pop score that Jacob Ryan Smith and Caroline Pernick wrote together, and it looks at legacy, identity, and what happens to the people left in the wake of infamous serial killers. It's a conversation about a true-crime industry that now reaches more than 250 million listeners worldwide, and it puts the focus on the families who have to live with the fallout. Director Tinashe Kajese-Bolden has called it "a surprising, darkly funny, deeply human story" about learning to live beyond the shadows we inherit.

Atlanta native Jacob Ryan Smith wrote the show after watching a program in which a serial killer's daughter gave an interview. From there, it went on to win the inaugural Open Jar Musical Shark Tank and make the semi-finals at the Eugene O'Neill New Music Theater Festival. The cast features Charity Angél Dawson as Lillian Clarke, Hannah Elless as Michelle, Benjamin H. Moore as Ben, and Sophie Pollono as Chris. Choreography is by Dell Howlett, and Alejandro Senior handles music direction.

It plays on the Hertz Stage, the Alliance's 200-seat black box theater located beneath the Memorial Arts Building. The run opens October 8 and closes November 15.