Shaina Taub to Release SONGS FROM OLD HATS Collection Next Week
By: Tyler Peterson Apr. 22, 2016
Old Hats - created and performed by Bill Irwin and David Shiner, directed by Tina Landau - retuned to New York's Signature Theatre earlier this year after a sold-out run in 2013. Using music, technology, and movement, Irwin and Shiner combine their inimitable magic and slapstick to create an unforgettable evening of fun. The show won Lucille Lortel and Drama Desk Awards, and was selected as a "Critics' Pick" by The New York Times and Time Out New York. Old Hats is the follow-up to the team's Tony Award winning theatrical creation Fool Moon.
"These songs were totally inspired by the clowns," says Taub. "They work with the tension between dark and light, joy and suffering. They find their comedy in the duality of the human experience we all share. So, I chose darker lyrical topics - death, sadness, global warming, wasted time - and juxtaposed them with sunny, catchy, feel-good music. I also wanted to marry an old-school throwback musical sensibility with a very contemporary voice, in the same way the clowns breathe fresh new life into classic forms."
Her musical creations for Old Hats first won accolades when the production opened at the Bay Area's American Conservatory Theater. The San Francisco Chronicle raved, "Irwin and Shiner have a special weapon in the person of Shaina Taub - sly and funny, sort of a young Judy Garland meets grown-up Lisa Simpson." She was called "utterly electric onstage" by the San Jose Mercury News. According to the San Francisco Examiner, "her songs, with their witty contemporary lyrics and old-style melodies, are terrific."
Taub recently signed a publishing deal with Ghostlight/Sh-k-Boom Records and Razor & Tie, the first artist in their new joint venture to represent songwriters that fuse theater and pop music. She earned a Lucille Lortel Award nomination for her portrayal of Princess Mary in the hit electropop opera, Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, also available from Ghostlight Records.
SHAINA TAUB is a New York-based performer and songwriter who made her Lincoln Center solo concert debut in their American Songbook series in 2015. Her sold-out Joe's Pub concert and debut EP What Otters Do were featured on NPR/WNYC's "Year's Best" list, and her debut full-length album Visitors was released last year.
As a songwriter, Shaina won the 2014 Jonathan Larson Grant, and was Ars Nova's 2012 Composer-in-Residence. Her original soul-folk opera, The Daughters, has been developed by the Yale Institute of Music Theatre, CAP21 Theater Company, and was featured in NYU's mainstage season. She has created songs for Walt Disney Imagineering and Sesame Street. Six-time Tony winner Audra McDonald is currently performing Shaina's song, The Tale of Bear & Otter, on her world concert tour. Shaina's musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night for the Public Theater with director Kwame Kwei-Armah will be performed this summer at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park as part of the Public Works initiative. She is also currently writing a new musical about Alice Paul and the American women's suffrage movement.
Shaina has traveled the world as a vocalist, actor and musician. She was Karen O's (of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs) vocal standby and back-up singer in her psycho-opera, Stop the Virgens at St. Ann's Warehouse and the Sydney Opera House. She performed the songs of Tom Waits in the American Repertory Theater's production of Shakespeare's The Tempest, for which she also arranged the music.
A fellow of the MacDowell Colony, the Yaddo Colony, the Sundance Institute and the Johnny Mercer Songwriter's Project, winner of the 2013 MAC John Wallowitch Award, a TEDx conference speaker, and a featured artist in the Gc Watches ad campaign, Shaina served on the music theatre faculty at Pace University, and is a University Scholar alumnus of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts.
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