Musical Theatre You Should Know

There is a wealth of new musical theatre concerts happening this time of year, from benefits to Cutting Edge Composers, from Contemporary Musical Theatre Songwriters You Should Know to Songs You Should Know. It's always a welcome thing to find yourself with an abundance of new musical theatre presentations, but when your budget and time are limited, how do you decide on what to see?

Last night I had the immense pleasure of attending Libra Theater Company's tuneful evening of new songs, conveniently titled, Songs You Should Know. And while admittedly (and in a good way) a lot of the writers are no longer people to know but people we already know and love, I realized through Libra's presentation what makes for a good musical concert of new songs.

The main thing is just that they're new. Fresh. That they give an indication of who the composers are and, more importantly, what they're working on next. As I listened to Caleb Hoyer's "If I Had Met You First," sung by Max Chernin, I was reminded of that feeling that I love when I see a new show-- that desire to have a single song last forever, or at least long enough so you can peel back the layers and live inside it for a little while.

I knew very few of the songs presented last night, but perhaps if you played them for me with no introduction, I could've made a guess and at least gotten kind of close. Miller and Tysen's "Town Goes Boom" was so specific to place and culture, a fresh slice of life delivered in a song as only they can. Joe Iconis' "Michael in the Bathroom" was a deliciously endearing geek-rock song that captured his brand of misfit like none other. And Amanda Green's haunting "Nowhere" and righteously angry "Waiting on My Thank You" demonstrated her great writing for self-aware, engrossing characters. It was also very cool to hear Amy Molewski and Nick Luckenbaugh's music make its 54 Below debut with "Rising Fire" and "Fall."

The evening was tied together by hilarious host Lauren Marcus, whose use of PowerPoint was better than half the things I've seen on Shark Tank. Her proof that she and Katie Thompson are basically the same person from behind was also quite compelling. The best part was that the evening felt very casual, very homey, a sense that I'm starting to get from a lot of Libra's productions.

Musical Theatre Music Videos: A Q&A with Annie Simpson

Hey, all! Here we are in 2014-- where did the time go?

With the new year come lots of new beginnings and hopefully a lot of great new theatre. One of my biggest resolutions this year is just that I want to create, to make more stuff, whether it be art, writing, or putting my work out there into the universe. On a similar wavelength, performer Annie Simpson recently got in touch with me about a new project she's working on: making good old fashioned music videos for new musical theatre writers' songs. With the pilot project being a video for Pasek and Paul's "Lying There," I was curious to know how Annie and her collaborator, Terrance Jackson, would approach other musical numbers and what place they hoped their videos would have in the musical theatre universe. Here's what Annie had to say:

Me: Where did the idea to make Musical Theatre Music Videos come from?

Annie Simpson: Like most musical theatre nerds, I spend a lot of time watching every theater related video I can get my hands on. One of my very best friends, Terrance Jackson, and I spend many nights on YouTube admiring what other artists are out there doing! Some of the greatest, most riveting, and heart-filled music belongs to musical theatre and yet, few people besides "theater people" ever experience it. Terrance and I want to change that. There are too many beautiful stories in musicals that some people will never even know about. That's when we realized that some sort of action needed to be taken. We started to wonder what would happen if we combined really great storytelling in music videos with the music of musical theatre? Perhaps if there was a someone who wouldn't be interested in sitting down and listening to a musical theatre song, they might be willing to watch a music video. If they were impacted by the music video, maybe they might want to watch another one or go see a live show someday. Musical theatre has done so much for my life and I want others to have that opportunity as well.

Me: How did you decide to do "Lying There" as your inaugural project? What was the process like concepting and shooting the video?

Annie: It all started one evening when Terrance and I were trying to decide what to do for the rest of the night. We are on tour right now and had a cancellation of a show we were scheduled to do the next day due to weather. Terrance and I are kind of like golden retrievers who can't sit still for very long at a time. One thing we have in common is a strong desire to create. We are always looking for new artistic endeavors that will challenge us! "Lying There" from Edges kind of found us. We both adore Pasek and Paul and love "Lying There". We listened to the song together and knew immediately it was perfect for our inaugural project. We were off to the races and the whole project was completed in less than 24 hours. We began by recording my voice on an accompaniment track at about 12:30 AM that night. We got up the next day and started to brainstorm how to storyboard this video. We decided midway through the storyboard process to cut straight to filming. "Lying There" is so beautifully crafted that the story we wanted to tell was jumping out at us and we were thinking too much and getting in the way! Our awesome friend, Barrett Guyton, was on board to make an appearance in this video and we totally improvised just about all of the footage. We would play the song in the background and let it speak to us. Terrance is an incredible director and was amazing at taking whatever impulses Barrett and I had and figuring out how to best capture those on film. Then we began the editing process which was surprisingly difficult. We had so much great footage that it was hard to decide what to keep and what to get rid of. It's amazing how if you seek to serve the piece of art you are creating, it will end up guiding you to exactly what it needs to be. And I hope that we were able to do that for this video!

Winter Hibernation Must Watch List

Hey, guys! It's been a little while, but I hope you're all enjoying the holidays. I've personally been incredibly busy preparing for the end of the year, but luckily there has been some great end-of-the-year musical theatre goodness to send 2013 off in style. On the roster of things you can do to celebrate Christmas with musical theatre, there's the tried and true Joe Iconis Christmas Spectacular coming up. Tonight, there's also this concert at the D-Lounge featuring holiday songs by BMI alumni, and Bill Finn's Ridiculously Talented Composers and Lyricists You Probably Don't Know But Should at 54 below.

If you're like me, however, and haven't had time to experience some of the great winter concerts and events in person, there is still great music to enjoy from your home. Here are some of the things that are getting me through this winter:

I couldn't be more happy for my friend, Sam Willmott, who won ASCAP's 2013 Harold Adamson Award this year. He performed recently at the Kennedy Center as a part of the ASCAP Centennial Celebration concerts, along with Amanda Yesnowitz and Deborah Abramson and hosts Pasek and Paul. Watch the whole concert here, and above is Sam's song "Recession Kind of Christmas" because, well, tis the season.

It feels like EVERYONE on Twitter was a-twitter about the 54 Below concert of Hit List, the fictional fringe musical from the short-lived TV show Smash. This concert reunited 3 of the original cast members and creative team from the show, including songwriters Pasek and Paul, Joe Iconis, Drew Gasparini, and Andrew McMahon. Above is Jeremy Jordan singing "Caught in the Storm," and you can view more here.

For anyone who might think the magic of Disney has dimmed over the years should be pleasantly surprised by The Mouse's latest movie, Frozen. Not only is the movie itself charming, but it also features the immense music-writing talents of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez and performer extraordinaire Idina Menzel. Need proof? Watch the video above for the sequence for the song "Let It Go."

Stay warm, guys! See you in the next year.

One Minute in a Lift

A couple of months ago, one of my fellow bloggers over on Crazytown, Michael Kras, mentioned Lift was one of his favorite lesser-known musical cast albums. Lift, referring to an elevator in Convent Garden in London, looks into the lives of strangers who share a minute-long ride together through the eyes of a train station busker. Lift by Craig Adams and Ian Watson represents the wave of new and emerging musicals from the UK, and it was developed extensively with Pitch Perfect Musicals, a company fighting the good fight by producing new works by new writers in London. Michael's mention definitely intrigued me about this show, and serendipitously enough, Lift is currently making its US debut with Beautiful Soup Theater at the Richard Shepard Theatre. 

Lift received mixed reviews in London with most citing its loose plotting as the area of concern. In many ways, Lift evokes shows like Company and Hello Again in its play with time and use of themes of longing and connection to build characters through brief vignettes. It's obvious that Craig Adams can write some great tunes, and lamentations of time and regret really ring true through his smart lyrics and haunting refrains. But there are a lot of aspects of the story that never quite gel-- though Lift shows small vignettes of possible connections between people in this elevator, it never establishes how or why we know these things. Are these scenarios all in the head of the romantic busker? And if not, what are these scenarios played out outside the lift supposed to signify about these characters, other than that they are lonely or hoping for something more than they have?

Beautiful Soup's production, directed by Steven Carl McCasland, features some lovely voices and some nice moments of cheeky humor. I can easily see Lift becoming a chamber musical cult favorite, since the music lends itself to lots of impressive solos and troubled characters. But even this production cannot overcome a lot of the holes in the plotting itself, leading to scattered moments of true musical connection with a lot of crowds rushing in between. I am glad that Lift made its way to this side of the pond, and I hope this is an introduction to more new British works making their way over in the future. In the meantime, you can catch Beautiful Soup's production, running until November 24th.

Working the Field: A Q&A with Jeremy Cone

When writer/composer Jeremy Cone first got in touch with me about his show, The Field, which will have a performance at Dixon Place on November 6th at 7:30 pm, I imagined a piece with honey-tongued twangs and a folksy flair as gentle as a Southern breeze through sun-warmed crops. For an urbanite, this didn't exactly sound like my cup of (sweet) tea at first. But while cadences of The Field echo hands working the land, there is also a very modern beat to the show, taking a rustic set piece and infiltrating it with universal themes of ambition, progress, and hope for fruit to come of hard labor.

To learn more about what exactly The Field was about, I talked to Jeremy about what influenced The Field, what the road has been like to Dixon Place, and how further developing The Field brought him to New York.

Me: Tell us a little bit about your background with music, writing and performance. What did you study in school? How did you realize that you wanted to be a part of all three?

Jeremy Cone: I grew up with a piano I was always playing around on. I was a hummer, and I made up a lot of songs. My parents played a lot of musicals on casette tapes in the car, or on road trips, and I liked the songs, but I also liked the stories they were a part of. I was in various plays and musicals at school and Temple growing up. At my high school, every year there was a cast-written play that gave students a chance to write our own lines and storylines. I really enjoyed creating and playing a part, and helping shape the plot of the show. I realized that was what I wanted to do, and what I could do. In college, I wrote and directed a few musicals. This was the first time combining music with the writing, and a bit of performing. I combined all three because there’s more than one way to tell a story. I could do more with multiple methods of storytelling. It was also fun writing stuff for other people, and I enjoyed working with friends and new people to create something. It was really special. I studied theatre and writing, but by doing these musicals, I learned how to execute my ideas, and that gave me the confidence to try it with The Field.

Me: What other artists inspire you?

Jeremy: Stephen Sondheim is one of the greatest lyricists.

I saw Roger Waters perform The Wall Live and it was amazing. It was a concert but also very theatrical. A new kind of musical theatre. I wanted to try something like that.

Dr. Seuss wrote some very wise, but simple words.

Sam Spence wrote glorious epic music for NFL films.

They've all been influential and inspirational.

Me: What is The Field? What is it about, and how would you describe it as a piece?

Jeremy: The Field is a modern musical myth about going out into “The Field,” working some land and growing life. It’s a story told through poetry, music, singing, folk tales, and projected pictures. The story follows someone trying to grow something where there is nothing. He sees a vision of Harvest Woman who says she’ll be real only when The Field is grown. So he works for her to someday appear, but there’s a Thief in The Field who steals his crops and prevents that reality from happening. He must fight the Thief, and keep growing.

59 Days in New York: An Interview with May-Elise Martinsen

So you move to the big city. You're an aspiring theatre artist, determined and wide-eyed, ready to make New York your own. What do you do? How do you get started?

For Amy, the protagonist of the new webseries 59 Days in New York, you keep a musical video diary. But something similar can be said of May-Elise Martinsen, the writer, composer, and star of 59 Days in New York. Having recently moved to the city with musical theatre dreams of her own, May-Elise created the webseries to help keep her occupied while waiting to start the NYU Graduate Musical Theatre Program. Four episodes in, and 59 Days has now taken on a life of its own.

In the interview below, May-Elise shares about the process making episodes for the series, talks golden age musicals, and discusses things that inspire her:

Me: Tell us a little about your background. What got you started writing musical pieces?

May-Elise Martinsen: During high school, I loved singing the standards of the “golden age” musical theatre repertoire, and I spent lots of time meditating on the merits of musical theatre movies like Show Boat and South Pacific. But it wasn’t until I returned to Norway the summer after my first year of college that I started thinking of writing my own show. That summer, I spent the days working at a local nursing home. In the off hours, however, I didn’t have much to do besides enjoy scenic walks and more scenic walks. I didn’t know many people in Oslo, and the few friends and relatives I did have in the city were enjoying vacation elsewhere.

It was the first time in years that I hadn’t had deadlines and homework to keep me occupied. That freedom prompted me to pick up a hobby I hadn’t touched since I was ten - writing songs. When I returned to Wellesley that fall, I brought a few of my new songs to a composer seminar. To my surprise and pleasure, the main reaction to the music was: this sounds as though it belongs in a musical.

The more I started exploring musical theatre writing, the more it felt like the right path for me - and the perfect way to combine my writing and performing interests.


Me: How has your Wellesley experience influenced your journey into musical theatre?

May-Elise: A small liberal arts school, Wellesley is not the traditional place to study music or develop a relationship with musical theatre. There were four music majors in my year, and the department strongly favored theory over performance and classical repertoire over any “popular” material (yes, musical theatre qualifies as “pop.”)

Still, when I told the faculty in my sophomore year that I wanted to write a full-length musical about Scandinavian medieval queen, Margrete I, for my senior thesis, I couldn’t have imagined a more supportive environment. Even though I had little composition experience, the faculty helped me arrange my own study abroad program in Norway and develop my Margrete musical compositions through several independent study classes. I ended up exploring one moment of Margrete’s life through three different storytelling mediums in a part research-part composition senior thesis. It was a great opportunity to develop musical theatre in a broader sense, and I feel grateful the faculty allowed me so much license to design an education that fit my goals.

New Broadway Babies: Bound for Broadway XIV

When I got an invite to attend the 14th Bound for Broadway concert, I was dying to go after seeing a line-up that included new works by the likes of Dan Elish, Salzman and Cunningham, and Adam Overett. Unfortunately, work prevented me from attending, but I sent in my good friend and impeccably theatre-savvy friend John O'Connor to scope out the show and send back a full report. Below are his thoughts.

Constantly trying to keep abreast of new musical being developed, I was surprised I had never been aware of Bound for Broadway, this year presenting their 14th concert of new musicals. Looking over their roster of past years, it seems at least one musical from each presentation has gone on to a major production that year. While this year’s five musicals had no clear standout, it was certainly be interesting to see where each goes from here.

"It's Only a First Date" from a performance at Urban Stages

First, host Liz Callaway introduced the writers of Nine Wives: Dan Elish (book and lyrics) and Douglas J. Cohen (music and lyrics). The men talked about meeting in the mailroom of Lincoln Center Theater and how the musical is adapted from a novel Dan wrote of the same title. The musical tells of Henry Mann who must find a date to his best friend’s wedding and the nine girls he dates on that journey. Looking to have the cast be three people, Henry, his best friend, and an actress playing all of the women, the musicals sounds like It could be a very funny, touching piece. The songs we heard, “She’s My Wife” and “It’s Only a First Date” were enjoyable – fairly straightforward songs with a repetitive structure. The strong performances from Adam Kantor and Sarah Stiles really showed the comedic potential the material has.