NAMT Announces 24th Annual Festival of New Musicals Creative Teams

The National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) announced today the creative teams selected to be part of the 24th Annual Festival of New Musicals on Thursday, October 11 and Friday, October 12 at New World Stages (340 West 50th Street).

 

Sam Buntrock, Tom Caruso, Jerry Dixon, Meredith McDonough, Rebecca Taichman and Michelle Tattenbaum, have been tapped to direct withKimberly Grigsby, Steve Marzullo and Emily Otto set to music direct.

 

Tony nominated director Sam Buntrock (Sunday in the Park with George) directs Bonfire Night, Justin Levine’s musical about a rousing band of 17^th Century English patriots who plot to bring their tyrannical monarch down with a bang!  Kimberly Grigsby (Spring Awakening) will music direct.

 

Tom Caruso returns as director of Southern Comfort after directing the award-winning workshop at CAP21 last fall. Dan Collins and Julianne Wick Davis’s musical based on the Sundance award-winning documentary about transgender friends living in rural Georgia.  Emily Otto is returning as music director. 

 

Jerry Dixon (The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin) will direct Kirsten Childs’s Funked Up Fairy Tales, a collection of delightfully twisted urban fairy tales for sophisticated children and grownup kids.  Steve Marzullo (Disaster) is music director.

 

Meredith McDonough (Upright Grand at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley) directs Triangle, Curtis Moore, Thomas Mizer and Joshua Scher’s original mystery/romance set against the backdrop of the infamous New York tragedy.

 

Rebecca Taichman, who directed the award-winning Milk Like Sugar, directs Sleeping Beauty Wakes, Rachel Sheinkin, Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda’s musical that delves into the magical space between dreaming and waking.  

 

Michelle Tattenbaum will continue as director of Nobody Loves You, after directing the world premiere earlier this season at The Old Globe. Itamar Moses and Gaby Alter’s musical is a behind-the-scenes look at a dating reality television show.

 

Additional staffing and casting will be announced at a later date.

 

Productions also announced for the 24^th Annual Festival of New Musicals are: Bleeding Love, an original musical by Jason Schafer, Arthur Lafrentz Bacon and Harris Doran, a wickedly demented, post-apocalyptic fairy tale for grownups and The Circus in Winter, Ben Clark and Beth Turcotte’s musical based on the Cathy Day novel where legend and lore collide under the big top. 

 

Held in New York City every fall over two days, the Festival presents 45-minute staged readings of eight new musicals before an industry-only audience with the experience and resources to move the work forward.

 

For the ninth consecutive year NAMT’s Festival of New Musicals will be presented at the premiere Off-Broadway facility New World Stages, located west of the Theatre District at 340 West 50^th Street.  A limited number of tickets will be made available to the public for free on a standby basis.  Registration for Industry members is free and now open at www.namt.org/festival.  Open registration closes on September 30 and any registrations received after that date will be subject to a late registration fee.

 

The 24th Annual Festival of New Musicals is overseen by NAMT’s New Work Director and Festival Producing Director Branden Huldeen and General Manager Lisa Dozier.  Alan Filderman is Casting Director for the Festival.  Betsy King Militello is the Executive Director of NAMT.

 

In 1989 the Festival of New Musicals was created to provide a forum to celebrate the new musicals that were being produced and presented around the country. Since then, the Festival has introduced musical theatre producers to 270 musicals and 490 writers from around the world. More than 75% of these shows have gone on to subsequent productions and tours, been printed in publishers' catalogues, and recorded on cast albums.

 

Past Festival productions include Adam Gwon's Ordinary Days, Don McKellar, Bob Martin, Greg Morrison and Lisa Lambert's The Drowsy Chaperone; Richard Morris, Dick Scanlan and Jeanine Tesori's Thoroughly Modern Millie; Stephen Schwartz and John Caird's Children of Eden; Kirsten Childs' The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin; George Stiles and Anthony Drewes' Honk!; Jason Robert Brown's Songs for a New World; and Hunter Foster and David Kirshenbaum's Summer of '42.

 

The National Alliance for Musical Theatre, founded in 1985, is a national service organization dedicated exclusively to musical theatre. Our mission is to advance musical theatre by nurturing the creation, development, production and presentation of new musicals. Our 150 members, located throughout 34 states and abroad, are some of the leading producers of musical theatre in the world, and include theatres, presenting organizations, higher education programs and individual producers.

 

The FESTIVAL OF NEW MUSICALS is funded entirely by contributions to the National Alliance for Musical Theatre, a not-for-profit organization, and is supported in part by a generous award from the National Endowment for the Arts and by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature. For more information about NAMT, please visit www.namt.org.

 

NAMT thanks the following foundations, government agencies and organizations for their ongoing support of our programs: The Alhadeff Family Charitable Foundation, The Ann Palmer Foundation, A.R.T./New York, ASCAP Foundation Irving Caesar Fund, BMI Foundation, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, Dubose and Dorothy Heyward Memorial Fund, The Dramatists Guild Fund, Friars Foundation, Edward & Thea Lawton Foundation, Frederick Loewe Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, The Rodgers and Hammerstein Foundation, Stacey Mindich Productions and The Shubert Foundation.