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Festival Show Update: The Mad Ones

August 29, 2017

This month we caught up with Kait Kerrigan and Brian Lowdermilk, the writers of 2016 Festival show The Mad Ones (formerly known as The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown). This November The Mad Ones will receive an off-Broadway run with new NAMT member The Prospect Theater Company, preceded by a concert with NAMT member Philadelphia Theatre Company. We talked with Kait and Brian about what’s been happening with the show since the Festival and how they’re preparing for this next exciting step.

What was the post Festival response to The Mad Ones like?
We had a powerful response to the piece. It’s a show that people in the industry have heard songs from for a long time so I think there was a lot of interest in seeing what the show was about. It was exciting for us to have the songs seen in context and have the piece feel like more than the sum of its parts. We were able to make connections with lots of theaters that might be interested in doing the show down the line as well as develop a few new relationships with champions of the piece.

NAMT News

INSIDE THE 2016 FESTIVAL: Choosing Your Creative Team & Cast

October 10, 2016

A guest blog post by Kait Kerrigan, one of the writers of this year’s Festival show The Unauthorized Autobiography of Samantha Brown, written with Brian Lowdermilk.
Choosing your collaborators is always a challenge. As writers in a long-term collaboration, it’s also an opportunity to inject life and breath into a project. When we applied to NAMT, it was with the intent of stripping down our piece to its strongest elements and making it feel fresh and relevant. We’re writing about a teenage girl who is dealing with her first brush with grief. There is a large canon of literature that plunges into those depths but we have approached it with a heightened theatricality that we think makes it feel fresh and newly emotional. We were looking for collaborators who could help us look at the piece from an entirely new angle. This meant that we were looking for people who had never worked on the project before.

NAMT News

Announcing the 28th Annual Festival of New Musicals

July 11, 2016

We are thrilled to announce the line-up of new musicals for the 28th Annual Festival of New Musicals, which takes place on Thursday, October 27 and Friday, October 28, 2016 in New York.
Now in its 28th year, the National Alliance for Musical Theatre’s Festival of New Musicals attracts theatre producers from around the world for this industry-only event to discover eight new musicals presented in 45-minute concert presentations over two days. All production costs are underwritten by NAMT, at no cost to the writing teams. As a non-profit organization, NAMT funds the Festival entirely through donations, sponsorships and contributions.
The festival has introduced musical theatre producers to 236 musicals and 448 writers from around the world. As a direct result of the Festival of New Musicals, more than 85% of the musicals presented have gone on to subsequent readings, workshops, productions and tours, been licensed, and/or recorded on cast albums. Some past festival shows include the Broadway-bound Come From Away (Spring 2017), The Drowsy Chaperone, It Shoulda Been You, Striking 12, Ordinary Days, Thoroughly Modern Millie, among many others.