LOCKED AND LOADED, AN AMERICAN MUSICAL Cast Album to be Released This Summer

A cast album of the 14 songs from Jim Brosseau's "Locked and Loaded, an American Musical" is scheduled for release this summer.

"Throughout the show's workshopping, these songs have been consistently well received," said Brosseau, the musical's composer, lyricist and book writer. Brosseau's show on America's gun obsession was first presented at the historic Provincetown Theater on Cape Cod. Members of New York's theater community heard 13 of its current 14 songs in a staged reading at the Theatre at St. John's in Greenwich Village.

"Jim Brosseau writes songs in the tradition of the Great American Songbook, which gives them a timeless quality," said Bill Russell, who received a best-book Tony nomination for "Side Show" and shared a best-score nomination with Henry Krieger. Russell also commended Brosseau's "haunting melodies and chord progressions, and his lyrics always have pure rhymes, which is a rarity these days."

The lead characters' solos and duets will be sung by Valton Jackson and Katie Martucci. Jackson has appeared in several Off-Broadway productions, as well as national and regional tours of such shows as "Guys and Dolls" and "Kinky Boots." Singer-songwriter Martucci has appeared on the "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" and tours as a soloist and with other pop, folk and jazz performers.

The remaining vocalists are Abigail Ludrof and Joseph (Go) Mahan. Piano accompaniment is by Aidan Scrimgeour, as well as Brosseau. The album will be produced by Sam Talmadge. Its engineer is Dylan Mckinstry of Greenpoint Recording Collective in Brooklyn, NY.

The former two-act musical is now an 85-minute one-act, with five actors instead of seven (www.broadwayworld.com/off-off-broadway/article/Staged-Reading-Set-For-Revamped-Gun-Musical-LOCKED-AND-LOADED-20190917).

"I wrote the musical as a way to address the concentric circles of pain wrought by gun violence," said Brosseau, an award-winning journalist. "My show strives for balance on the incendiary issue and is built around an unlikely love story."