Re-elect Tip! Just in time for election season, New Rep brings you the World Premiere of According to Tip. Featuring Broadway and TV star Ken Howard, this play traces the colorful and historically memorable career of Thomas P. “Tip” O’Neill, former Speaker of the House. Tip will escort you back in time from Barry’s Corner in Cambridge to the White House. Get the inside scoop on politics during the Red Scare, Watergate, and Vietnam in this touching played filled with humor, music, and beguiling Irish wit.

"Ken Howard and Rick Lombardo are the perfect team to bring Tip O'Neill to life on the stage of the New Rep. I can hardly wait,” said playwright Dick Flavin.

“I’m thrilled to be working with Ken Howard and Dick Flavin on According to Tip,” said Rick Lombardo, New Rep’s Producing Artistic Director. “New Rep’s dedication to new work comes from a mission to expose Boston audiences to emerging playwrights, and to nurture the future of American theater.”

The Artists

Rick Lombardo (Director) is now in his twelfth season as New Rep’s Producing Artistic Director. Earlier this year: A Streetcar Named Desire, A Pinter Duet: The Lover & Ashes to Ashes, The Clean House, and Dessa Rose.  Last season: The Pillowman, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol (which he also adapted), Silence, and The Wild Party, as well as Hamlet for Actors’ Shakespeare Project.  Other New Rep Credits: Ragtime (IRNE Awards-Best Director of a Musical and Best Musical); Bill W. and Dr. Bob (which he also directed Off-Broadway in the spring of 2007 at New World Stages in NY); Romeo and Juliet; Into the Woods (multiple IRNE Awards); Quills; Approaching Moomtaj;  The Threepenny Opera; A Girl’s War; his new musical adaptation of Moliere’s Scapin; Waiting for Godot (IRNE Award, Best Drama); Sweeney Todd (2004 Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Director, IRNE Award for Best Director, and Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Musical Production); The Weir (IRNE Award, Best Drama); Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Elliot Norton Award, Outstanding Director); The Scarlet Letter; American Buffalo; A Moon for the Misbegotten; Twelfth Night; Beast on the Moon; Das Barbecü; Tartuffe; and The Real Thing; among others.  Additional credits include the world premiere of Moby Dick: An American Opera, for which he received the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Theatre by Northern Ohio Live. He is honored to be a two-time recipient of the Elliot Norton Award from the Boston Theatre Critics Association for Outstanding Director.

Ken Howard (Tip) launched his acting career in 1968 when he won a role in the original Broadway production of Promises, Promises. He went onto originated the role of Thomas Jefferson in 1776 for which he won a Theatre World Award. He returned to the role for the 1972 film version. He won a Tony Award for his work in Child's Play in 1970. From 1978 - 1981, he created and starred in The White Shadow. He earned an Emmy in 1980 for his narration of The Body Human: Facts for Boys. Other film and television: The Thorn Birds, The West Wing, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Crossing Jordan, The Office, Cane, Brothers and Sisters, Rambo, and Michael Clayton. Upcoming films include, Still Waters, Smother, Two:Thirteen, The Beacon and Phelan Beale in the film adaptation of Grey Gardens for HBO.

Dick Flavin (Playwright) is a nationally known writer and speaker.  He has made thousands of speaking appearances all across America, chiefly addressing groups on the subject of how to use humor as a strategy in business and in life. His television commentaries have appeared on NBC-TV, CNN and WBZ-TV in Boston. He is the winner of seven New England regional Emmy Awards for writing and commentary. He was the narrator of The Teammates, an ESPN documentary that was nominated for three national Emmy Awards.  Known as the “Poet Laureate of the Boston Red Sox,” he has written countless poems and song parodies about the team and its history, some of which are being compiled into a compact disc and DVD. The most well-known of them, Teddy at the Bat, a salute to Red Sox legend Ted Williams that is based on Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s immortal Casey at the Bat, has been performed by Mr. Flavin at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, at Fenway Park and in cities and towns across the country. The San Francisco Examiner called it a “showstopper” and a “stunning, bravura bit.” He was the co-host of and contributing writer to Red Sox Stories, a weekly television series that ran during the 2007 baseball season. He has also written and performed special material for the Boston Pops and Symphony orchestras.  In addition to According the Tip, his play on the life and times of the late Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neill, Mr. Flavin has also written I Feel a Song Comin’ On, a soon to be produced musical about the lyricist Dorothy Fields