25 DAYS OF NAMT: "Part of Our World"...

Day 4

In 2003, the Festival featured The Ballad of Little Pinks a charming musical with music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Marion Adler, and a book by Connie Grappo.

Take a peek inside the original festival program for the show below. Can you spot the 2012 TONY Award winner in the cast? Comment below!

25 DAYS OF NAMT: Listen Up!

Day 3

Many NAMT shows go on to record cast albums. Here are a few shows that have recently gone through this exciting process. Click on each album cover to hear songs from the show or purchase the tracks!

 

 

*Lizzie will be released October 8th. Jump on this exciting pre-order right now!

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

25 DAYS OF NAMT: The Four-Timers Club

Day 2

Today we highlight David Kirshenbaum—the only author to have four shows presented through the NAMT Festival: Vanities (2006), Party Come Here (2005), Summer of '42 (1999) and Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus (1997). 

Take a look at this video spotlighting the Original Off Broadway production of Vanities, and featuring an interview with David: 

Congratulations on all your successes, David!

P.S.: Attend "SHOW OFF!" for a special performance from one of the Vanities original cast members. Can you guess who?

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

Welcome to 25 Days of NAMT!

Today marks 25 days until our Benefit “SHOW-OFF!"  celebrating 25 years of  NAMT’s Annual Festival of New Musicals. Leading up to the concert on October 20, we will be posting daily facts, photos, videos, and more, remembering some of the shows and authors from the last great 25 years. 

DAY 1

We begin with a blast to the past, heading back to the year 1989 to rediscover some of the shows that started it all... 

Little Ham recorded a cast album and it also available for licensing through Samuel French—visit their page on the show.

Read a New York Times review of Capitol Catwalk, which calls the show “ambitiously conceived” and “ingenious.”

Browse a newspaper article announcing the premier of the new musical Angelina by Barry Kleinbort.

And if you have the means, head to the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center in New York City to watch the Goodspeed Opera House production of The Real Life Story of Johnny De Facto.

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