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THE NEXT GENERATION |
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Signature Theatre is proud to announce the commencement of the American Musical Voices Project: The Next Generation. In 2007, The Shen Family Foundation donated one million dollars to fund the American Musical Voices Project, which supports emerging composers in the creation of new work for musical theater. The first installment of this project of their gift will be seen next season with Michael John LaChiusa's Giant. As a continuation of their commitment to the development of new musical theater, the Shen Family Foundation has generously awarded Signature a $300,000 grant in order to fund American Musical Voices Project: The Next Generation. Three emerging composers, Matt Conner, Adam Gwon, and Gabriel Kahane, have been given $25,000 to develop full-length musicals under the guidance of Artistic Director Eric Schaeffer. Their year-long work will culminate in summer 2009 with staged readings at the 21/24 Signature Lab, an intense three-week-long rehearsal program, and will be featured in a cabaret performance. In addition to the composer grants, The Shen Family Foundation awarded $5,000 stipends to two honorees, Peter Foley and Marisa Michelson. The honorees will use their funds to write new songs in hopes of being extended the composer grants next season. Together, these five budding composers make up the American Musical Voices Project: The Next Generation. The Next Generation Composers Grant Recipients
Matt Conner has been performing, composing, teaching, and music directing in the Washington, DC metropolitan area for the last eleven years. Mr. Conner's world premiere musical, Nevermore, was produced at Signature Theatre in 2006 (directed by Eric Schaeffer with orchestrations by Jonathan Tunick). He recently wrote the book/lyrics/music to A Carol Christmas for the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington DC, produced December 2007, as well as a new commissioned work for Signature Theatre entitled Crossing, which had it's first reading in October 2007. Among Mr. Conner's stage credits are: Aurelio/Ensemble in Kiss of the Spider Woman, Scotty in Merrily We Roll Along, Toby in Witches of Eastwick, Steward in Into the Woods, John Hinckley in Assassins, Tamate in Pacific Overtures (all for Signature Theatre); Riff in West Side Story (Olney Theatre Center); and The Page of Herodias in Oscar Wilde's Salome (Synetic Theatre). Mr. Conner received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Music Theatre from Shenandoah Conservatory of Music and has Music Directed numerous shows including Brigadoon, Grease, Crazy for You, Shenandoah,and his original score, A Christmas Carol. Mr. Conner is currently writing Senior Moments/Silver, a Signature Theatre commissioned musical still in the pre-workshop phase, and Partial Eclispe, a world premier song cycle to be produced at Signature Theatre in June 2009. Mr. Conner is also working on a children's show called The King of Pizza, about diversity and working together, which will be produced in the fall of 2008. Mr. Conner is a proud voice on the Grammy Award®-winning recording of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem, a teaching artist with Creative Cauldron, Inc., and a member of the Actors Equity Association. For more information on Matt Conner, visit www.mattconner.org.
Adam Gwon is a composer and lyricist recently named one of "50 to Watch" by The Dramatist magazine. His latest musical Ordinary Days will receive its world premiere at Pennsylvania Centre Stage in summer 2008, and its UK premiere at the Finborough Theatre in London in fall 2008. His other musicals include the upcoming Bernice Bobs Her Hair with librettist Julia Jordan and director Joe Calarco, Ethan Frome with bookwriter Michael Ruby, and Lulu. His work has been seen at Primary Stages, the York Theatre, New Dramatists, NYMF, NAMT, American Music Theatre Project, the ASCAP/Disney Musical Theatre Workshop, HERE, the Flea Theater, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, and many others. He has scored more than 25 productions across the country, and also writes for film and advertising. Adam is a graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, was a 2006-07 musical theater fellow at the Dramatists Guild, and is currently a teaching artist with Roundabout Theatre Company, where he helps 8th graders write musicals about paintings, presidents, and pajamas. Visit www.adamgwon.com.
Composer/performer Gabriel Kahane defies classification through his sonically challenging, emotionally resonant, and deeply accessible work. Kahane's most well-known work is his Craigslistlieder, an eight movement song cycle which comprises settings of anonymous classified ads from craigslist.org. In addition to its many performances throughout the US by the composer, Craigslistlieder was heard in excerpt at Carnegie Hall this season, in a recital by critically-acclaimed baritone Thomas Meglioranza. The summer of 2008 will witness the premiere of Kahane's For The Union Dead, a new song cycle on poems by Robert Lowell for small ensemble, at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland. Among his varied credits as a performer, Gabriel has appeared in recital with Grammy winning bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff throughout Europe, toured the Schumann Piano Quintet with the Mark Morris Dance Group, and accompanied violinist Hilary Hahn in the slow movement of the Sibelius Violin Concerto in a dirty bar. He has shared the stage with indie-rock luminaries My Brightest Diamond and Luke Temple, and has recorded with Sufjan Stevens and former Nickel Creek front-man Chris Thile. Kahane's sprawling self-titled debut LP, to be released in October 2008, features twenty-odd musicians while deftly marrying dense harmony and counterpoint to tasty melodic hooks. Much in demand as a composer of chamber music, Gabriel is currently completing solo piano commissions for pianists Natasha Paremski as well as for his father, Jeffrey Kahane. An evening-length work exploring his family's genealogy and journey from Germany to the United States will premiere in the fall of 2009. An avid theater artist, Kahane has collaborated extensively with the Obie-winning New York City-based downtown theater company Les Frères Corbusier, serving as musical director for a number of their productions including Hell House, A Very Merry Unauthorized Scientology Pageant, and the Los Angeles production of Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. Visit www.gabrielkahane.com for more information.
The Next Generation Honorees
Peter Foley's music and lyrics for The Hidden Sky earned him an NEA grant, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Stephen Sondheim Award, and a Jonathan Larson Foundation grant. The Hidden Sky premiered at the Prince Music Theater in Philadelphia, where it was nominated for seven Barrymore Awards including Outstanding Original Score and Outstanding Production; it was subsequently produced at the Spirit of Broadway Theater in Norwich, Connecticut, where it received the Spirit Award for Best Original Score. Concert versions have been performed at Ars Nova and Joe's Pub in NYC. Peter's other stage works include The Bear (Golden Fleece, Triangle Theater Co., Opera Unlimited), music for "To Sing" from Songs from an Unmade Bed (New York Theatre Workshop) and scores for several plays, including Newton's Universe (Arts at St. Ann's), Henry V (New Jersey Shakespeare Festival), W.B. Yeats's The Only Jealousy of Emer (Playwrights Horizons Theater School), Andre Gregory's Alice in Wonderland (Berkeley Theater Project), and The Mildred Piece (InCoAct, NYC). Upcoming theater projects include a music-theater piece with playwright Ellen McLaughlin and the new musical comedy Bloom. Peter's songs have been performed at Lincoln Center, Town Hall, Symphony Space and LaMaMa, among other venues. He has also composed scores and themes for numerous television documentaries, including "Listening To America with Bill Moyers" and the award-winning PBS series "Art:21." Peter has served as musical director/keyboardist for the premieres of Rinde Eckert's Highway Ulysses (American Repertory Theater, dir. Robert Woodruff), Kenneth Vega's Heartfield (Baltimore Theater Project), and for several concerts by actor/singer-songwriter Manoel Felciano. He is the recipient of fellowships and residencies from the MacDowell and Millay colonies, the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's National Music Theater Conference, and the Sundance Playwrights Retreat at Ucross. He lives outside New York City with his wife, writer/director Kate Chisholm, and their daughter. See hellagoodmusic.com for more information.
Marisa Michelson currently lives in New York City, where she teaches singing and piano to children and adults both privately and through Soyulla artists (www.soyulla.com). Her original musical (written with Joshua H. Cohen), Still Life With Toe Shoes will have its world premiere this July with Old Deerfield Productions in western Massachusetts, before traveling to Macedonia in November as part of the Albanian National Theatre festival. Marisa and Joshua were also recently commissioned by the Prospect Theater Company to create a short musical based on Rene Magritte's painting "The Lovers." Marisa's full-length musical, Hotel Sarajevo, which she co-conceived with Stephanie Johnstone and for which she wrote book, music and lyrics, has received readings at CAP 21/NYU and Smith College, and is currently being developed for education and outreach with the New York- based QuoVadimus Theatre. Last year she traveled to India on a fellowship to compose music and study Hindustani singing in the Global Arts Village for three months and this past March, Marisa was selected to participate in the New Dramatists Guild's Composer-Librettist studio. Marisa graduated with a BFA in Drama from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. She has studied composition with Adam Guettel and is the winner of the 2006 St. Botolph Award for Excellence in Composition. For more inforation, visit www.MarisaMichelson.com.
American Musical Voices Project: The Next Generation Partner The Shen Family Foundation is committed to supporting and encouraging excellence, originality, and high aspiration in musical theater music-writing through its Musical Theater Composers Project. Inspired by the extraordinary, innovative musical theater works of Stephen Sondheim, the Foundation has engaged with non-profit theater organizations to help fund more than 40 projects since 2002 involving the creation, development, production, and cast recordings of works by Mr. Sondheim, and the next generation of innovative musical theater composers, including Ricky Ian Gordon, Adam Guettel, Michael John LaChiusa and Joseph Thalken. Productions for which the Foundation has provided or committed major funding include: the Kennedy Center's Sondheim Celebration (2002); Stephen Sondheim's Merrily We Roll Along Reunion Concert (Musical Theatre Works, 2002), Assassins (Roundabout Theatre, 2004), The Frogs (Lincoln Center Theater, 2004), Pacific Overtures (Roundabout, 2004), Follies (Encores!, 2007), Merrily We Roll Along (Signature Theatre, 2007), Sunday in the Park with George (Roundabout, 2008) and Bounce (The Public Theater, 2008); Symphony Space's Wall to Wall Sondheim (2005); Ricky Ian Gordon's My Life with Albertine (Playwrights Horizons,2003), Orpheus and Euridice (Lincoln Center), The Grapes of Wrath (Minnesota Opera, 2007, and Utah Symphony & Opera, 2007), and States of Independence (NorthwesternUniversity, 2009); Adam Guettel's The Light in the Piazza (Lincoln Center Theater, 2005); Michael John LaChiusa's R Shomon (Williamstown Theatre Festival, 2004), The Highest Yellow (Signature Theatre, 2004), See What I Wanna See (Public Theater, 2005), Bernarda Alba (Lincoln Center Theater, 2006) Send (who are you? I love you) (Houston Grand Opera,2006), Hotel C'Est L'Amour (Blank Theatre Company, 2006), Little Fish (Blank Theatre, 2007), and Queen of the Mist (Transport Group, 2009); Joseph Thalken's Was (Human Race Theater, 2004, and Northwestern University,2005), and Harold and Maude (Paper Mill Playhouse, 2005, TheatreWorks, 2005, and Human Race Theater, 2007). TheFoundation has also provided separate major funding for the cast recordings of: StephenSondheim's Pacific Overtures (2005); Ricky Ian Gordon's Only Heaven (2002), My Life with Albertine (2003), Dream True (2006), Orpheus and Euridice (2006), and The Grapes of Wrath (2008); Michael JohnLaChiusa's See What I Wanna See (2006), Bernarda Alba (2006), and Little Fish (2008). Other productions funded by the Foundation include Meet John Doe (Andrew Gerle/Eddie Sugarman, Ford's Theatre, 2007) and Take Flight (David Shire/Richard Maltby, Menier Chocolate Factory, 2007). Please visit The Shen Family Foundation for more information about their generous grant and to learn more about the American Musical Voices Project.
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