As their show “graduates” from Southern California to New York City, Mary Mariebookwriter and lyricist Chana Wise sweetly reflects on how it felt to be greeted by a fresh new group of
actors and singers who will breathe new life into their musical. So, we’ve made it into the NAMT Festival. We’ve got an amazing director and musical director, we’ve sweated over cutting our piece to the required 45-minutes, and now—casting!
Truth be told, almost from the first moment I put fingertips to keyboard in the creation of Mary Marie I was able to hear the voices of the characters coming from the mouths of specific actors; friends who had agreed to help us develop the show. They got us through the teething, crawling, first steps, dare I say potty training, and eventually the adolescent stage of the show, and we have been so fortunate that these actors stayed with us through the whole development process, which included five or six staged readings. Not only had they become entrenched in the work, but we all
We kick off Festival week with Sarah Hammond’s delightful reflections on what
inspired her to transition from playwright to bookwriter of this year’s Festival show, String! I came to New York as a playwright, but I'm like most theater kids from the farflung suburbs of America: I grew up on musicals. At 9, I was choreographing dances for "If Momma Was Married" to be performed on roller skates at the bottom of our cul de sac. I grew up singing Aladdin in the carpool, playing munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, and from 5th through 8th grade, cast myself as Little Red for school talent shows, in which I sang in a dress my grandma made. What a geek! I had an aquablue tie-dye JC Superstar tee-shirt, in the bible-thumping South, and I remember insisting earnestly, "it's not a church shirt, it's a theater shirt, it is a show, a musical, and it is by Andrew Lloyd Weber." Geek.
Then in college, I discovered Falsettos and Hello Again,and while I wrote plays in South Carolina and then Iowa, I secretly loved these great ruthless musicals created by faraway people. In shows like these, singing's like breathing. Like there's no other way to exist except in music. It's tumultuous and it's funny and it's the best thing there is. But I loved all that in secret. I never knew any musical theatre writers till I got to New York in 2006, and when I got here, one of the first people I met was Adam Gwon, which turned out to be a pretty lucky break. Adam loves playwrights, and I love musicals, so... crazily, we decided to
With less than a week until the Festival, How to Break bookwriter/lyricist and Festival Alum Aaron Jafferis reminisces about his successes and memories (albeit sporadic)
since the 2007 Festival, and why returning to the Festival proves to be an important step in the development of his latest project. Along with Rebecca Hart and Yako 440, I’m one of the authors of How to Break,a hip-hop musical about being ill, that will be showcased at this year’s Festival. I’m pretty sure my and Ian Williams’ show Kingdom was in the NAMT festival 2007. Though I have no memory of the year 2007, I have evidence that it worked out well, since many of the contacts in my “theatre industry” Excel spreadsheet say “NAMT 07.” I also know that it was at the NAMT festival where folks from The Old Globe first got interested in Kingdom,which is what led to our first production, first agent, first improper liaison with a cast member, etc.
(Note: that last “first” is in dispute, thanks to differing definitions of words like “improper” and
The 2014 NAMT Festival is just TWO WEEKS AWAY, and today we have Cubamorbookwriter and lyricist James Sasser giving us a special video blog capturing, in "real" time, his process of creating a 45-minute version of his musical to showcase at New World Stages.
As we get closer to the Festival, Mary Mariecomposer Carl Johnson reflects on the daunting task of preparing musical arrangements for his Festival presentation, as
well as the challenges and great rewards of live performance. I’ve been working on orchestrating the music for our show Mary Marie for the Festival, and have been pondering the differences between writing for live theater and writing for film and television. It seems almost as if it’s the difference between planning for a worst-case or a best-case scenario! In studio recording you plan for a best-case scenario in terms of the performance you get out of the musicians. The recording studio is temperature-controlled, the lighting is optimized for reading, there are a variety of microphones set up around the instruments so that every nuance of their playing can be captured without the musician having to overplay or hold back. Even the catering and bathroom-break schedule is designed to put the players in the best frame of mind to play perfectly. In a live situation, you never know what the players are going to encounter! Even the best-
We kick off this year's Festival season with our first Festival Countdown Blog! In this
entry, Duane Poole, bookwriter of Beautiful Poison, gives us insight on how to prepare the 45-minute cut of the show for the Festival. So we get the news that we made the cut. (By “we” I mean composer Brendan Milburn, lyricist Valerie Vigoda, and bookwriter me.) Our “Beautiful Poison” is in this year’s NAMT Festival! The thrill of the announcement is still fresh when we realize we have yet another cut to make -- bringing our two-hour musical down to a strict forty-five minutes for the presentation.
Okay, this shouldn’t be a problem. As both a writer and producer, I’ve done this sort of thing countless times over the years. But there seems to be extra pressure on this particular cut. Perhaps it’s knowing who might be in our audiences this October. What can we show these theatre insiders in that abbreviated time that will truly represent the variety of music, the twists of plot, and the richness of character we three have worked so hard to create?
We briefly consider using a narrator to present the entire musical, speeding past plot points
