The Public Theater announced on Monday that its 2012-13 season will include two new musicals: A three-hour adaptation of Edna Ferber’s novel “Giant,” with a score by Michael John LaChiusa (“Hello Again,” “Queen of the Mist”), and a deconstruction of the rise and fall of Imelda Marcos, the former first lady of the Philippines, by the musicians David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.

The Off Broadway season will also feature the plays “Sorry,” the third politically themed installment of Richard Nelson’s dramas about the fictitious Apple family, and “Old Fashioned Prostitutes (A True Romance),” written, directed and designed by Richard Foreman, the avant garde provocateur whose work “Idiot Savant” ran at the Public in 2009.

Mr. Foreman, who is in his mid-70s, is often said to be on the verge of retirement, but the artistic director of the Public, Oskar Eustis, said on Monday that he urged Mr. Foreman to stage the new play.

“It’s a romance where there’s nothing conventional about it, and there is a beautiful European melancholy to it,” Mr. Eustis said. “It’s the most lyrical and delicate thing I’ve ever read of Richard’s.”

This fall the Public will produce the world premiere of a comedy about death and healing, “Wild With Happy,” by the actor Colman Domingo (“The Scottsboro Boys”). He will also be among the cast of the show, which is set to run Oct. 9 to Nov. 11.

“Sorry” will run Oct. 30 to Nov. 18 and feature Laila Robins, J. Smith-Cameron and other cast members from Mr. Nelson’s previous Apple plays, “That Hopey Changey Thing” and “Sweet and Sad.” The new work is set on the morning of Election Day 2012, and will open that same evening, Nov. 6.

“Giant,” which has a book by Sybille Pearson, will be directed by Michael Greif (“Next to Normal”) and is scheduled to run Oct. 26 to Dec. 2. Mr. Eustis said that Mr. LaChiusa and Ms. Pearson were rewriting and tightening some of the work, but that he still expected it to run about three hours. That is roughly the length of the show’s production this winter in Dallas, though an hour less than the 2009 world premiere of “Giant” at Signature Theater in Virginia.

The season will also include the new play “The Twenty-Seventh Man” by Nathan Englander in late 2012. The play, the novelist’s first, was postponed from this season.

After that, the Public, in collaboration with the Classical Theater of Harlem, will present “Detroit 67,” a new play by Dominique Morisseau about two siblings who turn their basement into an after-hours Motown joint amid the Detroit riots of 1967. The play is set to run Feb. 26 to March 17, 2013. Next up is a production (with an English language translation) of Guillermo Calderon’s play “Neva.”

The Imelda Marcos musical, “Here Lies Love,” to be directed by Alex Timbers (“Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson”), will run April 2 to May 5, 2013. Mr. Byrne released an album featuring songs from the show in 2010, and has performed some of them in concert settings, but this will be the first fully staged production. It will be followed by Mr. Foreman’s play, scheduled to run April 30 to June 2, 2013.