Festival Show Update: THE SANDMAN

Last month, we caught up with alumni Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor about the development of their 2013 Festival show, The Sandman, with Playing Pretend and their upcoming production in Denmark.

Drawn from the more nightmarish fantasy of E.T.A. Hoffmann, author of The Nutcracker, comes a new and darkly comic musical tale: The Sandman.  When Maria, the wife of an ingenious German clockmaker named Albert Strauss engages a new nanny, Fraulein Kaeseschweiss, to care for the two children, Nathaniel and Theresa, a series of bizarre and unnatural events begins to unfold.  As Theresa falls mysteriously ill, a flamboyant and unconventional physician, Dr. Copelius, is summoned upon the nanny's recommendation. The doctor comes with a young ward in tow, Clara Stahlbaum, recently orphaned after her entire family was incinerated in an inexplicable Christmas tree fire.  And as the Strauss family is thrust ever deeper into chaos, the sinister and Machiavellian forces at play are gradually revealed—forces from which only the children may be able to save them.

What was the feedback like after you presented at the Festival?  
The feedback immediately following the presentations was very strong.  This included members approaching us directly after the performances and at the followup "meet the authors" events.  There were certainly a lot of questions about how the story ended, the true "fear factor" and the appropriateness of the material for various age groups.  From our point of view this was a perfect response because it meant we had used the presentation to introduce the material, but not give the whole thing away and to make people curious about whether or not the show was right for their theater.  It seems to us that the best thing an author can do is to present an excerpt that makes the members want to read and listen to the complete work.

Festival Show Update: MY HEART IS THE DRUM

This month, we check in on 2013 Festival show My Heart is The Drum and its authors Stacey Luftig, Phillip Palmer and Jennie Redling on their recent reading at NAMT Member The Village Theatre in Issaquah, WA and their upcoming production at NAMT Member Kent State University.

My Heart Is the Drum is a big musical set in West Africa with a driving, African-influenced score. It is about Efua Kuti, a 16-year-old girl who aches to leave behind her stifling, poverty-struck village to become a teacher, and Edward Adu, a traditional farmhand who is in love with her. Inspired by the spirit of her grandmother, Efua runs away to the city of Accra to attend the university, but on arrival gets abducted into prostitution. Edward sets out to find her. Efua has always been able to draw on her cunning to solve her problems, but will she escape these most desperate circumstances? And if Edward finds her, will he still love her now that she has been “disgraced?” At its core, the musical is about finding the inner strength to achieve your goals and create social change.​

What was feedback like for your show after you presented in our Festival?
Mainly, people told us they wanted to know what will happen to Efua, our heroine, in Act II. We took that as a good sign.

You had the opportunity to bring the show to Goodspeed’s Johnny Mercer Writers Colony this winter.  What did you work on during that time in snowy Connecticut? 
First, we went through the script and pinpointed the scenes, lyrics and music that we had always labelled "good enough for now" and that we'd fix "later." Our time at Goodspeed was our "later."
We also focused on two pivotal moments for Efua, one in Act I, one in Act II. We all feel very passionately about her, and it took several passes—including one serious crash and burn—before we found the monologue in Act I, and the completely unexpected song in Act II, that we all felt to be "effortlessly" right.

This month at Village Theatre, you had your first ever reading of the full show.  What was it like to finally hear the whole show aloud in front of a public audience? 
Thrilling and gratifying.  After so many years since its start at the BMI workshop, we could see that we had a full, working show and one that moved people. The audience also responded strongly to the script's humor. For the songs, they not only clapped, but cheered for most of them and scene moments also drew applause.  

Festival Show Update: ANALOG AND VINYL

Festival 2013 show Analog and Vinyl is jumping up to Vermont's Weston Playhouse this summer for its world premiere. This month we check in with the show's writer Paul Gordon about preparing for the musical's first production.   Harrison is obsessed with LPs from the sixties and the superior quality of analog. Rodeo Girl, a quirky Silver Lake hipster, is obsessed with Harrison but he barely notices. With his vintage record store about to go under, Harrison and Rodeo Girl are visited by a mysterious customer who makes them a devilish offer they can't refuse. What did you learn about Analog and Vinyl while preparing it for the Festival?  Preparing for the Festival wasn't as much a learning experience as it was an "inspiring" experience. Once you know your show is going to be seen by an industry audience, it does strange things to the creative process. You start looking at the material with more fluid eyes. You start questioning and examining the material (all while trying to create a 45-minute presentation), and suddenly you begin asking yourself the serious dramaturgical questions of theme and character (that you had previously avoided) that are vital to the developmental process. One of the great gifts that came out of my preparation for the Festival was that I felt incentivized to write a new song for the lead character that helped to transform the show. Your show only had readings leading up to the Festival and now is preparing for a world premiere this summer at Weston Playhouse. What has it been like to jump from reading to production without a workshop in between?

Get to Know MY HEART IS THE DRUM

An interview with Stacey Luftig, Jennie Redling and Phillip Palmer, writers of the 2013 Festival show My Heart Is the Drum, about how they explored African society to create such a dynamic piece, their musical and cultural inspirations and how NAMT has evolved their show throughout the Festival process.

What was the impetus to create a story around a young girl with dreams larger than her African village? 

Phillip, who had been traveling and studying traditional music in South Africa and Ghana, wanted to dramatize the people and important issues he encountered there, namely the intersection of the devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic—particularly for women—and the deep poverty that is so different from what Americans experience. He also wanted to tell a story of a person with great potential who most likely would be wildly successful if she had been born into a middle-class American family, but who had to fight like crazy to have even the most basic opportunities where she happened to be born. Phillip's original outline also explored the connection between people in different countries, including a separate plot line about a dynastic Virginia cotton farming family that lobbied for the American cotton subsidies that depressed the West African cotton market and drove Efua and her family into poverty. Jennie, who had written several plays with strong teenage female protagonists and who was also a rape crisis counselor, was drawn to the material. Keeping the core characters and setting Phillip created, she reshaped the story and breathed life into Efua and the coterie of strong women who surround her.

The struggle between embracing tradition and moving away in search of progress seems to be a central theme of this piece. What are you trying to negotiate in this discussion?

This has been a big topic for the three of us; not only the theme of tradition versus progress, but education versus ignorance. Efua, our heroine, rebels against tradition. Her main means of rebellion is her pursuit of a college education (rare for girls in her community), because she wants more for her life "than just marriage and babies." In doing so, she looks down on some of those around her, whom she considers ignorant because they are less curious and more content with their lives. Understandably, her arrogance becomes destructive to these relationships. While she does have some book knowledge, what Efua lacks is experience and wisdom. While seeking the chance for a college education, however, Efua does acquire a degree of wisdom—a quality she didn't know she needed. Her growth is characterized by a greater open-mindedness, compassion, and a new appreciation of some of the traditional values and beliefs that she pushed away in the first place. However, traditional beliefs

Reflections on the Festival

A guest blog entry from Rob Taylor, writer of The Sandman, presented last weekend at the Festival of New Musicals.  

Now a mile high and two hours behind, the weeks just past in New York in preparation for the NAMT Festival presentations of our little nightmare musical "The Sandman" feel less as if they occurred in a distant time zone, and rather more as if they happened within a time warp.

Can it be over already? Did we actually find and rehearse a cast, slice and shrink an entire Act into a 45 minute cliffhanger, and convey the essence of the macabre little world of our imagining to all those people? Impossible.

And it all would have been impossible - were it not for the surreally magical way in which a dream cast and creative team seemed to materialize around us, and were it not for the outstanding and intuitive support NAMT seemed ready to provide at every turn.

Eight years ago, Richard and I participated in another NAMT Festival. As happy as we were to have been included in those 2005 proceedings, the organizational improvements put

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Music Rehearsals

A guest blog entry from David Hein, writer of Come From Away to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

I grew up listening to Newfoundland folk music – bands like Great Big Sea, Shanneyganock and The Navigators playing instruments like accordion, mandolin, bodhran, tin whistle and “ugly sticks.” They sang sea shanties with thirty verses that you couldn’t understand all the words to about drinking, shipwrecks, drinking, lost loves, drinking, loneliness and more drinking. In kitchen parties along the coast, people would dance until they fell down or drank until they fell down or a little of both. Raucous and rowdy, Newfoundland folk is passionate music and, like Newfoundland itself, it’s a looooong way away from the musical theatre of New York (which we also love – it’s just that, until Once, that kind of music wasn’t heard much in these here parts).

We first workshopped Come From Away at The Canadian Musical Theatre Project with a four piece band: (1) acoustic guitar, (2) fiddle/viola/cello, (3) accordion/mandolin/guitar and (4) bodhran/drums/mandolin/low whistle. We were trying to represent not only this amazing original style of music, but also to represent through music what happened in Newfoundland after 9/11 when so many passengers were stranded there – a fusion of many diverse cultures. So we not only needed to play Newfoundland folk, but ambitiously, we decided to also add a little Texan country, some African drums, Moldovan choral chanting, Hebrew and Hindu prayers and more…

But when we brought Come From Away to Goodspeed, we were told we could only use a piano – and that it would be played by our music director who was assigned to us – some guy named Dan Pardo. Honestly, we were

25 DAYS OF NAMT: A Sneak Peek

DAY 19

Today we take a break from looking at Festivals past and jump ahead to this year’s! Here is a sneak peek at our 2013 Festival program—front page, back page, and inside page about how the festival runs. Will you be joining us later this week for the live festivities?  

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: One Week Away

A guest blog entry from Kevin Del Aguila, writer of The Astonishing Return of...The Protagonists! to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

It’s a week away from NAMT, I've got our 40ish-minute cut of the show ready, we've written a new song for the presentation, we've assembled an UNBELIEVABLE cast, and yet all I can do is think about the venue where the whole thing will take place: New World Stages.

New World Stages is where I go every night. Not because I love hanging out in a basement, but because that's where I'm currently performing in Peter and the Starcatcher, reprising the role of “Smee” that I originated on Broadway. Our producers recently announced that the show will be closing in mid-January, so I've felt a little nostalgic about New World recently, and started to think about how much time I've spent there.

With a style that can only be described as “airplane hanger chic,” New World Stages is the place where I first became involved with NAMT as the director of the See Rock City and Other Destinations presentations in 2008. Hey! That's not true!  I was a performer in 

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Get to Know COME FROM AWAY

An interview with Irene Sankoff and David Hein, writers of the upcoming Festival show Come From Away, about exploring an unexplored topic, composing a musical inspired by Newfoundland and how the Festival has challenged this writing team.

Come From Away depicts an aspect of 9/11 that is not often focused on. How did you hear about the event in Newfoundland, and what inspired you to write about it?

Irene Sankoff: Our friend Michael Rubinoff (a NAMT member through Sheridan College and the Canadian Music Theatre Project) suggested the idea - and after a quick Google search we found so many articles and news clips that we'd be sitting there for hours looking at them with tears in our eyes. We saw that there were events planned in Newfoundland to commemorate the 10th Anniversary of 9/11, and we noticed many of the people who had been stranded there so unexpectedly were returning to visit the friends that they had made 10 years earlier - and so we decided we had to be there too. We applied for a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to spend close to a month out there - and we got it. 

When we arrived everyone was so willing to share their stories with us, and they spoke of one another and their memories with respect and love and gratitude toward the Newfoundlanders for putting them up, feeding them, entertaining them and befriending them during such a terrifying time. It was such a positive response to a hateful act and the people who were there to experience the Newfoundlanders’ hospitality really want this aspect of history to be shared. The stories are not only touching, there are humorous ones, too. At one of the shelters, a local asked a passenger if there was anything she needed - she said "A cup of coffee... and my dog." The local left the shelter and then returned a while later with a cup of coffee and the family's pet dog to keep her company. That's just one story of the many amazing stories we heard...

What is the intended function of the story as a re-telling instead of happening in the present tense?

IS: We were inspired initially by The Laramie Project. Both shows are about a town's response to a tragedy as told through the people who were affected by it. It's important to underline how much the time spent in Newfoundland still resonates with the people who were stranded there after 10 years. And we wanted to relay the stories as much as possible in the way they were told to us.We weren't interested in a fictionalized retelling of history, since what actually happened was so amazing (having said that, we still needed to take thousands of stories from hundreds of people and turn them into a musical, so some of the people we met are merged into one character, and some events that happened we ascribed to different characters, but while it's not a documentary, it's all based on truth). Finally, the story we wanted to tell wasn't just that people were treated incredibly when stranded in Newfoundland—we wanted to show that they and the Newfoundland community were changed by these events—and we felt we could only do that by showing what happened next when the passengers returned home. The town felt emptier and quiet for the first time. And passengers who returned home wrestled with their experience being so different from everyone else's - and they all mourned losing something amazing that they never expected to find. It was really only ten years later, when these groups reunited, that the story finally felt resolved. 

The Newfoundland accent is fascinating. What was it like writing for this dialect, and what were your considerations for how quickly an American audience would catch on?

IS: Ow's dat, B'y? Oh, my ducky, the Newfoundland tongue - she's right difficult! But she's a beauty too, B'y!

We were immersed in the dialect while visiting Newfoundland in September 2011, and found some

25 DAYS OF NAMT: They Just Can't Get Enough!

Day 7

This year’s 25^th Annual Festival of New Musicals features FIVE returning teams of  writers. Find out more about the history of each team at NAMT below and be sure to visit the 2013 Festival page to hear clips from their shows. 

* These authors have appeared at the Festival even more times than are listed above! Without Mr. Taylor, Robert Oberacker co-wrote In That Valley (Fest '99); without Mr. Greenberg, Tommy Newman penned Tinyard Hill (Fest '07); without Mr. Drewe, George Stiles was on the team for The Three Musketeers (Fest '99). We are thrilled to have them and their collaborators back!

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Get to Know THE SANDMAN

An interview with Richard Oberacker and Robert Taylor, writers of the upcoming Festival show The Sandman, about  adapting the horror genre for the stage and writing "a little nightmare musical" for kids and adults alike.

NAMT: The Sandman is a true horror musical, not something that we see a lot of. Have you always wanted to write in this genre?

Richard Oberacker: Ever since I was a very young child, I had two obsessions: musical theatre and haunted houses. I think I understood that a good haunted house was actually interactive, immersive theater. And, oddly, throughout most of my youth, I became a bit of an entrepreneur, designing and building haunted attractions. I guess I always wondered if my two obsessions could be combined—but, of course, it had to be the right story. The best horror movies are always of a singular vision and have a delicate balance of fright and comedy. Both of those are authentic and therefore work only if they are organically connected to the story—they arise out of the givens of the circumstances. That means only the perfect story can give rise to the perfect recipe. If we had not happened upon Hoffmann's work, and "Der Sandman" in particular, we would not have attempted a so-called horror musical.  

NAMT: How did you discover the stories The Sandman is based on? Did you immediately know you wanted to adapt them into a musical?

Robert Taylor: Saying "we happened upon Hoffmann's work" as Richard indicated is somewhat disingenuous, in that German romanticism in general, and the complete works of E.T.A. Hoffmann in particular, were a major area of study for me in my years at the Universities of Bonn and Princeton. Further, every child of the Western World knows Hoffmann's Nutcracker. Offenbach's opera The Tales of Hoffmann actually contains elements of The Sandman story, as does Delibes' classic ballet Coppelia. So in truth, I've known and been fascinated by Hoffmann's sinister fairy tales (as well as those of Edgar Allen Poe, who counted Hoffmann among his favorite writers) for most of my life—and they seem to naturally lend themselves to musical theatricalization. I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with Hoffmann having been a brilliant musician and composer in his own right, with chamber music, symphonies, ballets and operas to his credit, as well as an unparalleled writer of fantasy. His fiction is filled with music and tales of musicians. He worshiped

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: The Importance of the Demo

A guest blog entry from Tim Rosser, writer of The Boy Who Danced On Air to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

Everything about making a demo takes an extraordinary amount of time. Writing the orchestrations, rehearsing the singers, doing take after take, mixing it all together. Hours and hours and hours of your life. And it can always take longer. It's basically up to you - how many hours and dollars are you willing to put in. You want it to be perfect because in some cases you need to sell your show with a song or two and the better technology gets, the more perfect it can be. And if you are a product of the catholic school system like me, you never think you're trying hard enough. It's the perfect storm. And then there are the practical decisions that make me want to pull my hair out. Who should sing the song? Who should play? How many people does it take to sound like a chorus? Like an orchestra? Will a click track make this song sound super tight or squeeze the life out of it? To use computer generated sounds or acoustic? How much money are we really willing to spend on a track of a song that could very realistically be cut from the show in a month? I have a heart-breaking story (my heart!) for every one of these variables and even so I still don't feel like I'm in control most of the time Charlie and I go into the studio. I'd like to think I'm a little better at recognizing when we have a real problem on our hands and knowing how to fix it efficiently. But even then, I don't actually know how much people care when the drums aren't tuned right or there's a mysterious purring sound on the guitar track or the tempo is too slow. Maybe no one notices any of those things. Or only some of them. That's the thing with writing music and recording demos, I guess. It's all taste and guessing.  

I'd like to think that you can't make a bad song sound like a good one with a good demo or a good song sound like a bad one with a bad demo, but I don't believe that. I don't necessarily believe that

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: It Takes a (NAMT) Village...

A guest blog entry from Irene Sankoff, writer of Come From Away to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

On August 6^th, I delivered a brand new production that my husband and co-author, David Hein, and I had been working on for nine months. At 6 lbs, 1 ounce, she was heavier than most of our scripts (although nowhere near if you counted every draft). The delivery took 37 hours, but thanks to a crazy rotating team of doctors, nurses, residents, doulas and David, trying (in vain) to look calm and distract me by reading all the parts from Peter And The Starcatcher, opening night was (relatively) painless. We named her Molly.

Two days later, with a newborn in one hand and a keyboard in another – with the wi-fi password from Mt. Sinai hospital – we delivered the NAMT Act One 45-minute cut of our musical, Come From Away: Molly’s sibling. This cut and the entire presentation at NAMT took no less of a stellar team of professionals to accompany its birth.

We’d been working on Come From Away for longer than nine months – we started writing it in 2011, when we traveled out to Newfoundland to research it. Come From Away tells the true story of when thousands of international residents were stranded in a tiny, Canadian community in Newfoundland – and how the experience changed the lives of the passengers and the people there. It’s an inspiring story of cross-border collaboration during an international tragedy. We spent almost a month out in Newfoundland interviewing countless passengers, flight crew, locals and more. We returned home, continued to interview people across the world over Skype and then finally started putting the pieces together in workshops at Sheridan College’s Canadian Musical Theatre Project and then at Goodspeed Musicals’ Festival of New Artists. Then we got the incredible honor of being accepted into NAMT’s Festival… and did I mention I had just discovered through a series of (not so) subtle signs and discomforts that I was pregnant?

As Canadian playwrights, we don’t know many people in the New York Theatre world, so we considered it good fortune when

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Get to Know the Team Behind THE THREE LITTLE PIGS

An interview with George Stiles and Anthony Drewe, writers of the upcoming Festival show The Three Little Pigs, about the ups and downs of writing for children, the insights gained from international productions and their upcoming performance in the Festival of New Musicals. Interview conducted by NAMT's Program Intern Audra LaBrosse.  

NAMT: Three Little Pigs is a familiar story to most people. During your writing, how did you go about updating the tale and adding original touches?

George Stiles: Well, we did a similar thing with Honk!, our re-take of The Ugly Duckling. We enjoy making the characters as "human" as possible, and updating the dialogue so it feels contemporary and classic all at the same time! Family dynamics always interest us, how brothers and sisters manage to get along with each other, even though they're often very different characters. So with the Pigs, we liked the idea that the father of the family had been "taken" by the Big Bad Wolf, so there's a tension from the outset and makes the Mother a strong but put-upon figure who's had to raise her piglets single-handed. We also thought a Wolf who reckoned he was "misunderstood" was fun... after all, he's just doing what wolves do!

NAMT: This show is part of a "trio of trilogies.” Tell us a bit more about that concept.

GS: That's all [Anthony’s] fault. He's greedy. One's never enough. But what's great about it is that a theatre can choose to "mix and match" the shows. The second is Goldilocks and the Three Bears, which we premiered earlier this year - and the final part will be The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Each is 45-50 minutes long, so you can do 1, 2 or 3 of them with the same 5 actors, and design a simple set that works for all three. That way, theatres can program the shows for daytime or evening presentations. 

NAMT: Can you tell us briefly how you went about updating the other stories in the trilogy?

Anthony Drewe: Well we haven't written The Three Billy Goats Gruff yet, but Goldilocks And The Three Bears is ready to go and played very successfully in Singapore earlier this year. Our self-imposed conundrum in writing the trilogy was that we wanted it to be possible to perform all three shows with the same five actors. In the story of Goldilocks there are traditionally only 4 characters, but this limitation actually gave us our way into retelling the story. We first meet Goldi as she

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: On the Record

A guest blog entry from Michael Shaieb, writer of The Astonishing Return of... The Protagonists! to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

About fifteen years ago when I graduated from the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Writing program, I was faced with the reality of what I would do for a living. I had some recording equipment and thought that perhaps I could start a recording studio. When I met my partner, Brent Lord, who had the technical knowledge, we formed a company which later became FatLab Music. We specialized in recording demos for music theatre writers and performers.

When I began writing The Protagonists with my collaborator, Kevin del Aguila, the question was how do we record our show to convey the different stylistic choices we created for our world. The Protagonists contains a world of

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Get to Know THE BOY WHO DANCED ON AIR

An interview with Charlie Sohne and Tim Rosser, writers of the upcoming Festival show The Boy Who Danced on Air, about the careful process of writing a show about the Afghani tradition of Bacha bazi, which literally translated means “boy play,” a practice where wealthy men take in poorer boys and train them to dance. Interview conducted by NAMT's Program Intern Audra LaBrosse.  

NAMT: Bacha bazi is not a well-known practice to a Western audience. How did you learn about this tradition and what about it inspired you to write a musical centered on it?

Charlie Sohne: We saw a documentary about bacha bazi called The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan and it kind of smacked us in the face. The access that the filmmaker got to both the men and boys involved was really amazing and the existence of the practice brought up so many questions that to us felt universal to all cultures, including our own. The discussions we had afterwards about religion, the different ways sexuality expresses itself and the intersection of tradition, morality and a community’s power structure made us feel like there was a lot there to be mined.

Tim Rosser: We were also very interested at the time in finding material that “demanded to be musicalized” – as in, it would feel like a let down to tell this story without music because music and dance are essential to this subject matter.

NAMT: Was there a moment of this documentary that stuck out most, that you saw and imagined a dramatic moment immediately?

CS:  The most striking moment for me was when one of the boys talks about growing up and owning boys of his own. It was absolutely fascinating to hear how matter of fact it was and how much of an inevitability it was for him. 

TR: And that moment was actually the basis and inspiration for the song “When I Have A Boy Of My Own” that ends Act I. (Editors note: listen to a clip from this song on the Festival info page)

NAMT: Historical and cultural accuracy are important in the writing of any show, and especially one with a sensitive subject matter like The Boy Who Danced on Air. What has the process of writing the show been like, keeping this in mind?

CS: Our first step was

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: A Trilogy of Trios

A guest blog entry from George Stiles, writer of The Three Little Pigs to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

The Three Little Pigs was written in response to a specific brief from the Singapore Repertory Theatre. Over the past few years, they have built up their younger audiences - from 3 years and over - with their dedicated "The Little Company." Singapore has a huge number of school-age children, for whom English is their first language, with Malay, Mandarin or Hokkien as their second. SRT realised that this audience was barely catered for with live entertainment and that, aside from large, highly-visible branded tours, there was a lack of high quality musical theatre material.

Since we already had considerable experience writing for a truly "family" audience (Honk!, Mary Poppins, Just So, Peter Pan) we were intrigued to see how we could adapt our style to cater for an audience of 3 years and upwards. We were encouraged to find a story that "sold itself" by having title recognition, and that had a small cast to make the numbers work. We briefly thought of Snow White, before realizing it inherently demanded at least 8 in the cast! So we soon settled on The Three Little Pigs - immediately wondering if we could write a "trilogy of trios" - and move on to Goldilocks and the Three Bears and The Three Billy Goats Gruff. Well, we figured the "rule of three" works even better as the rule of three threes!

We quickly found a sense of liberation knowing that we wanted the show to run at 45-50 minutes, have just 5 in the cast and be understood by very young children as well as be enjoyed by their older brothers, sisters, parents and grandparents. As kids, we both remember loving

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Get to Know ANALOG AND VINYL

An interview with Paul Gordon, writer of the upcoming Festival show Analog and Vinyl, about revisiting his musical roots and just how different developing Analog and Vinyl is from working on his 2006 Festival show Emma. Interview conducted by NAMT's Program Intern Audra LaBrosse. 

NAMT: Analog and Vinyl marks your second time as part of the Festival. What part of your experience with Emma in 2006 drew you back?

PAUL GORDON: The Festival is such a wonderful opportunity, not only to show your work to a large theatre community, but it also allows the authors to see their work in an entirely different light, as we are required to present the essence of the work in 45 minutes. This forces you to truly identify what's important in your storytelling and make hard choices. With Emma, the big discovery was having the character of Emma break the fourth wall through narration, a device we use today that never would have been discovered without the Festival. The Festival directly led to many first class regional productions of Emma and a possible Broadway future. 

NAMT: Has the Festival process so far revealed or refined anything about Analog and Vinyl?

PG: Absolutely. When you condense your script to 45 minutes you learn things about the storytelling you didn't know before. My biggest challenge with Analog and Vinyl was trying to balance the songs between the two leading characters. Once I cut the script down, the character of Harrison was short changed on songs at the beginning of the show, so I decided to write a new song just for the festival called "My Mythology.” Now I can't imagine doing the show without that song. The Festival has already improved the show and we're not even in rehearsals yet.

NAMT: Tell us a bit about the genesis of Analog and Vinyl.

PG: Analog and Vinyl's original title was: “Analog and Vinyl: A Jukebox Musical of Songs That Nobody Has Ever Heard of That Were Never Hits.” (Too long?) A few years ago I decided to write a musical based on my own catalogue of pop songs that I used to perform myself back when I was a singer-songwriter playing clubs around Los Angeles. I wrote the first draft of the show as an exercise for myself to see if I could write a jukebox musical. Since I did not have access to a famous music catalogue, I decided to use my own, which I own and control myself.  So I took one song and

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Finding the Right Director

A guest blog entry from Jennie Redling, writer of My Heart Is the Drum to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

As a librettist and playwright, I've always considered rehearsals to be the most exciting part of a production. It's when the characters who have allowed me to hear and write their voices and passions and who have lived inside and beside me are suddenly before me—alive.

In terms of preparing for rehearsal, choosing a director is, for me, the most important part. This is a story about how we discovered a director who is an uncannily ideal match for our NAMT presentation of My Heart Is the Drum.

You need to know that for this show I had developed a major case of the jitters. I had become unusually attached to, and protective of, the characters I had been writing for our musical, especially the two lead girls: a tenderly naïve sixteen-year-old protagonist from Ghana and her equally innocent best friend of the same age. Could the universe deliver the special person in whose hands they would be safe and bloom?

When Branden [Huldeen, NAMT’s Festival Producing Director] presented our team with a list of possible directors to choose from, Stacey, Phillip and I set about learning as much as we could about them on the Internet. I can't remember in what order I reviewed the various (fine and highly reputable) directors, I only know (thank you, PBS Video) that the smiling image of

FESTIVAL COUNTDOWN: Not Another Sinking Ship Musical

A guest blog entry from Ben Sussman, writer of Eastland to be presented at this year's Festival of New Musicals.  

Years back, when I first heard Andy White's pitch for Eastland, I was incredulous. "Another sinking ship musical?  Are you kidding me?" The Titanic story has already been romanticized for decades, because it has all the elements of a tabloid headline: fabulously wealthy people, tremendous hubris, followed by karmic retribution.

But the Eastland story is almost exactly the opposite. While the time period is the same (1915), here we have a bunch of low-income, blue collar immigrants boarding a boat for their corporate summer picnic. Before the ship even leaves the dock, it capsizes and more than 800 people drown. There is brief media attention, then silence. This was the worst boating disaster in U.S. history and to this day almost nobody has heard of it. 

And so Andy approaches his script thoughtfully: if such a tragedy is so easily forgotten, what does that mean about the value of these people's lives? Does their socioeconomic status make them less important? What is the value of anyone's life? And are we really in control of our path to the extent that we think we are? 

   Things shift, they change    

   That's life, it rearranges

And speaking of unexpected twists -- I recently discovered that this story is directly relevant to my own. Through genealogical research and interviews, I learned that my own great grandfather was yet another employee set to board the Eastland. He arrived a bit late, after the boat had already turned over. If he had showed up 20 minutes earlier, would I even be here to help tell the story?

Needless to say, it was an intense and thrilling experience bringing this show into a full production at Lookingglass Theatre last year.  And now the excitement has returned again as we begin to make cuts, dust off the score, and discuss casting options for the NAMT production. We can't wait to spin this tale with new voices, to an even larger audience.