Manhattan School Of Music Musical Theatre Lab Series To Develop New Musicals By Grace McLean and More

The Musical Theatre Lab Series at Manhattan School of Music will house developmental workshops and readings of four new musicals in its 2025-26 season, featuring the work of Jonathan Larson grantees, a two-time Obie Award-winner, and a recent Tony Award nominee.

Directed by MSM Musical Theatre faculty member Aaron Ricciardi, the Lab Series uses an inclusive, open-submission process to select cutting-edge musical theatre projects with potential for professional life. Workshops and readings feature MSM student actors, musicians, and production assistants.

This season, the four projects' residencies will last the entire season, with one workshop in the fall semester and another in spring. Each residency will culminate in a private, invitation-only presentation as part of a month-long festival of new musicals in April 2026.

The 2025-26 Lab Series season will be comprised of Starblasters, with book by Katie Hathaway and music and lyrics by Tony nominee Benjamin Velez (Real Women Have Curves); Magia, written by Letitia Bullard and Nathan Leitão; Pop Off, Michelangelo!, written by Larson grantee Dylan MarcAurele (Lewis Loves Clark); and A Short History, which has a book by Kate Walbert, music by Larson grantee and Lucille Lortel Award-winner Grace McLean (In the Green), and lyrics by McLean and Walbert.

Starblasters follows five friends who have spent the 10 years since high school hiding behind the nostalgic specter of their youths by working at the local run-down theme park. But with the park's closure looming, they must face the future head on, or face the prospect of a life dependent on their parents, chained to a dead-end job, losing their ability to dream. Britt Berke will direct.

Magia is an original fantasy musical with a Latin-Caribbean fusion score in which a teen girl attempts to save her ailing father by stealing a wish from a magical island. The show asks, "What is the real magic, and how can we access it in a society that accepts the status quo?"

Fresh off an encore run at the Edinburgh Fringe, Pop Off, Michelangelo! is a musical comedy about besties-turned-bitter-rivals Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, both gay and attempting to earn divine forgiveness by becoming the greatest religious artists of all time. With an electropop score as infectious as the bubonic plague, and a script that has not been remotely fact-checked, this Renaissance adventure is both hilarious and unhinged. Stephen Santa will direct.

Adapted from author Kate Walbert's New York Times bestselling novel A Short History of Women, A Short History is a non-linear journey through time, unspooling the complicated life and legacy of Dorothy Trevor, a firebrand thinker and suffragist who died on a hunger strike in England in 1914. As it traces one family's complicated legacy of mothers and daughters, the show reveals how much has changed for women, and how little. Two-time Obie winner Lee Sunday Evans (Oratorio for Living Things) will direct.

The Lab Series was created in 2021 by MSM Dean of Musical Theatre Liza Gennaro and since then has developed work by Will Connolly, Douglas J. Cohen, Dan Elish, Mark Hollmann, Greg Kotis, Anna K. Jacobs, Emily Loesser, Michael Mitnick, Veronica Mansour, Rob Rokicki, Don Stephenson, Vince Vawter, Jim Wann, Zack Zadek, and more.

For more information about the Lab Series program, including how to submit a show, please visit the Lab Series homepage. For press inquiries, please contact Katharine Burns, Marketing and Public Relations Manager, at kburns@msmnyc.edu.