New Musicals HIT THE WALL and REBEL GENIUS Selected for 2018 LIVEREAD@SDA

After a rigorously competitive submission and selection process, new musicals, Rebel Genius and Hit The Wall. have been selected for the second season of LiveRead@SDA, a developmental series at the USC School of Dramatic Arts created to cultivate and provide critical support for the creation of innovative and contemporary new works for the American theatre.

With LiveRead@SDA professional artists are invited to weeklong workshop residencies on the USC campus, where they can take bold steps to refining their work with access to a diverse talent pool. The School of Dramatic Arts provides the necessary resources and staff to produce a concert-style reading with professional photography and video of the performance. Additionally, these workshops afford the School's students an invaluable opportunity to work with industry leaders - producers, directors, playwrights, lyricists, composers and choreographers - while gaining insights and practical experience in what it means to intensively workshop new musicals headed toward commercial production.

The two new musicals selected illuminate a forward-thinking landscape of contemporary musical and highlight the School's commitment to cultural diversity:

REBEL GENIUS
A new musical from creator Matthew Puckett based on the life of the young and highly ambitious Albert Einstein. The musical crashes physics and love into one another as Albert falls madly in love and then risks everything he has to find a perfect Unified Theory of the universe. REBEL GENIUS is a contemporary exploration into the heart of an icon torn between great ambition and a passionate love for the people in his life.
Book, Music and Lyrics by Matthew Puckett

HIT THE WALL
Summer, 1969. A dangerous cocktail of oppression, heat, and a police raid erupts into a riot at The Stonewall Inn, igniting the LGBT rights movement. HIT THE WALL fuses the celebrated musical-theatre imagination of playwright Ike Holter, the immersive vision of award-winning director Ken Sawyer, and original music by Anna Waronker (That Dog) and Charlotte Caffey (The Go-Go's).
Author Ike Holter
Music by Charlotte Gaffey & Anna Waronker
Lyrics by Ike Holter, Charlotte Gaffey & Anna Waronker
Directed by Ken Sawyer
Originally produced by the Los Angeles LGBT Center & Sixth Ave.

About the USC School of Dramatic Arts
Under the leadership of Dean David Bridel, the faculty and administration of the USC School of Dramatic Arts has begun to reimagine and redefine what it means to train dramatic artists in the 21st Century without losing the rigorus foundational training that has been a hallmark of the School for over 70 years. This flexible and contemporary approach responds to today's rapidly changing media climate, and provides the versatile and cutting-edge skills essential to the contemporary actor, writer, stage manager and designer.

[Image: Photo by Michael Reuter/Capture Imaging]