In a “Critic’s Notebook” article in The New York Times, Setting New Standards: American Songbook Series Reshapes the Canon, Stephen Holden and other Times critics and editors suggest “songs that could further expand the notion of the songbook.” Their picks included several Festival of New Musicals alumni!
I just got back from two weekends of catching great Festival shows. First I was in Seattle to catch Vanities a new musical (Fest ’06) at The 5th Avenue and Iron Curtain (Fest ’09) at The Village Theatre. Then this past weekend I swung down to see Liberty Smith (Fest ’00) at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, DC. All three productions were fantastic, inspiring and very worthy of future productions.
The Festival is just the first step in the process of getting great new musicals out into the field. The next steps rely on theatres seeing each other’s work, sharing work and spreading great musicals around the country. I know the economy is still rough but when you set your next budget, try to find money to include some travel for your key staff to see other work around the NAMT membership and maybe even find a little more to help host a NAMT member at your theatre during your next great project. No one wants a new musical to only have one production, and that can change with you taking one quick trip to a fellow NAMT member to see their great work!
And so, when the 30th anniversary began to loom, Heifner became more open to the notion of turning “Vanities” into a musical. A friend put him together with composer Kirshenbaum, whose best-known credit is the off-Broadway musical “Summer of ’42.”
The musical version of “Vanities” was showcased at the 2006 National Alliance for Musical Theatre Festival of New Musicals in New York and had its first production at TheatreWorks in Palo Alto that same year. …
Heifner’s long-standing reluctance to turn “Vanities” into a musical was based in part on the jobs he’d had rewriting other people’s musicals. “My experience of musicals has not been a lot of fun,” he admits. “I’ve tended to think that there are too many cooks on a musical. What I love about playwriting is that it’s usually just the playwright and the director, and you own it and you can pretty much control its destiny. That’s not true on a musical.”
While the NAMT festival can be considered a wonderful thing — if not a sure thing — for musical composers, lyricists and librettists, it’s also a commendable opportunity for the actors appearing before representatives of most of the country’s important presenting houses.
Helen Sneed, a former NAMT executive director, calls the event “one of the most comprehensive audiences of musical theater professionals.” She also says that the actors are not only “being seen by a group that works very closely together” but they get “a great opportunity to do a new work.”
Chris Grady, licensing head at Cameron Mackintosh International and in from London, says actors “absolutely” benefit from NAMT exposure. “If I were a casting director, I’d go to this instead of all the auditions,” he says. Tina McPhearson, vice president for programming at Dayton’s Victoria Theatre, describes the NAMT audience as “the cream of the crop.”
Perhaps the best arguments for actors on the musical comedy track to look into future festivals are the roster of actors who participated this year. Paid a flat $100 salary for what Equity limits to 20 hours of rehearsal, the performers include Marc Kudisch, Brian D’Arcy James, Douglas Sills, Lillias White, Darius de Haas, Michael Winther, Dee Hoty, Gregg Edelman, Stephen DeRosa, Jenn Harris, Megan Lawrence, Kerry Butler, Adam Heller, James Judy, Sebastian Arcelus, Megan Hilty, Sarah Stiles, and Leslie Kritzer, who was so enthusiastic she did two shows.