The Manship Theatre in Baton Rouge has featured many great live performances since its opening nearly a decade ago, and now the theatre is set to play host to one of Baton Rouge’s most ambitious and fresh theatrical acts.
New Venture Theatre recently was given a residency within the Manship Theatre and will be hosting its productions at the Manship Theatre in the Shaw Center for the Arts.  
Greg Williams Jr., the Artistic Director and founder of New Venture Theatre, is enthusiastic about the deal.
“For me, it means we’re doing something right,” Williams said. “It’s not easy to run an arts organization in Louisiana, but at the same time, we’re the most cultural state in the nation, which has always been a weird thing for me to understand.”
New Venture Theatre was born from Williams’ dream of looking at theater from new, diverse perspectives with fresh production twists. After working with the Negro Ensemble Company in New York, Williams returned to Baton Rouge to make his dreams a reality.
“I realized there were a lot of voices in the world of theatre that wanted exposure,” Williams said. “There’s the Latin community, the homosexual community. A lot of people did not have outlets to express themselves, so I decided to start this theatre company that was based on diversity to showcase all the voices of our nation.”
New Venture Theatre has been hard at work in the Manship Theatre’s Hartley Vey workshop on its upcoming performance of “In the Heights.”
“In the Heights” is a Tony Award-winning musical about a Latin community in New York City’s Washington Heights. 
“The best way to describe it is how ‘Rent’ was meant to define the ’90s generation, ‘In the Heights’ was meant to define the millennial generation,” Williams said. “It changed the entire game of musical theatre.”
Williams praised the music of “In the Heights,” calling it “brilliant.” He said the music is a mix of hip-hop and sound samples with a traditional musical soundscape. 
Williams also expressed why his performers enhance the musical experience to new levels.
“Honestly, I have the most talented actors in the entire city of Baton Rouge working this piece,” Williams said. “Each one of them could drop an album tomorrow and it would sell out.”
The first performance of “In the Heights” will be on Thursday, Sept. 11 and will run through Sunday, Sept. 14.
New Venture Theatre’s residency in the Manship Theatre is sure to attract the community’s attention with its diverse style and interesting take on production as a whole. New Venture Theatre’s interest in diverse character stories paints a colorful portrait of real people in the hopes that someone in the audience can relate to them.
“I want people to hear everybody’s voices,” Williams said.