Schwartz, Gleason, Jbara, Etc. Honored at NETC in Nov.
The 2006 New England Theatre Conference (NETC) will be holding its annual theatre convention held at the Omni New Haven Hotel at Yale from November 16 – 19, 2006 and this year will include a star-studded line-up of award winners and workshop presenters. Among the honorees will be Stephen Schwartz, Joanna Gleason and Gregory Jbara.
The Major Award recipient this year will be Stephen Schwartz, the composer/lyricist whose Broadway credits include Wicked, Pippin, The Magic Show and Godspell; he also penned The Baker's Wife. Schwartz collaborated with composer Alan Menken on the scores for the Disney animated features Pocahontas, for which he received two Academy Awards and another Grammy, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. He also provided songs for DreamWorks' first animated feature, The Prince of Egypt, for which he won another Academy Award for the song "When You Believe."
Another Special Award Recipient is filmmaker/writer Rick McKay. His "Broadway: The Golden Age" has won over 15 film festival awards to date, is on 17 critics' year-end lists of their Top Ten Films of 2004 and was a hit in theatres around the country. The DVD has been a best seller as a Sony/BMG release and the film premiered on US television in March 2006 on national PBS. Two sequels to the film are already in production with Robert Redford, Liza Minnelli, Glenn Close, Alan Cumming, Liev Schreiber and 100 other stars. McKay's documentary, "Fay Wray: A Life" is due out in late 2006. In a special seminar session, McKay will be talking about his "Broadway: The Golden Age" film as well giving a sneak clips of the upcoming sequel, "Broadway: The Next Generation."
Rounding out the honorees is producer/director Jamie McGonnigal as a Regional Award Winner. As a theatrical producer and director, he has been responsible for many acclaimed concerts. As the founding artistic producer of The World AIDS Day Concerts, he has presented concerts of the New York Premiere of Stephen Schwartz' Children of Eden, the concert premiere of Pippin starring Rosie O'Donnell and Ben Vereen, and The Secret Garden. McGonnigal has produced and/or directed more than 50 events in just three years for The Matthew Shepard Foundation, God's Love We Deliver, Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, and more. His current projects include the 4th Annual World AIDS Day Concert of the musical Rags, to take place December 11th at Times Square's Nokia Theatre.
Videos