It’s 1936; the golden age of Hollywood, and two rival movie studios are in a heated battle for survival when their opposing leading men fall in love. Reminiscent of screwball comedies of the past, this new musical takes place in a world of artifice, backstabbing, lavender weddings, double-crossing starlets, and a moral crusader from the Legion of Rectitude, making it increasingly more difficult for the leading men to hold on to the one real thing each has ever found. It’s funny, charming, romantic, happily nostalgic, and very tuneful.
Before we dive in to the show, Academy for NewMusical Theatre recently rebranded as New Musicals Inc. Tell us a bit about the motivation behind the change and what this means for the company.
This is actually our second name change: for 30 years, we were the Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, focusing entirely on writers.
But in 2002, we added workshops for actors and producers, and felt we needed a new name to reflect the larger vision. Since THAT time, we have expanded our mission to include public performances, concerts, and production. That expansion has been very successful, giving us national presence, national partners with producers and theatre companies, and so we felt the need to make a distinction between our academic programs and our professional production and development branches. We wanted a name that would characterize us as a professional organization with ties to the commercial producing world, that also runs a school. So..."New Musicals Inc."
(We will still be running our academic division under the name "Academy for New Musical Theatre," as a program at NMI.)
This show was born out of your workshop/reading process. Tell us a bit about how NMI helps develop shows.
