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Know a Theatre: WaterTower Theatre of Addison, Texas

For the second month in a row, a NAMT member was featured in American Theatre‘s monthly “Know a Theatre” feature. This month, American Theatre spoke with Joanie Schultz, the new artistic director at WaterTower Theatre in Addison, TX. They spoke about about the theatre’s history, Schultz’s relationship to the organization and her excitement about theatre’s future.

I’m in the midst of a lot of exciting new developments at WaterTower, as we shift our focus toward creating empathy, building community, and creating dialogue with innovative, engaging theatre that speaks to our contemporary moment. This coming season we will be doing new and contemporary work and using our theatre in ways it’s never been used before. It’s an exciting time to be in the Dallas-Fort Worth area and at WaterTower Theatre in particular.

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WaterTower Theatre's CREEP-ing Ambition

The Dallas Morning News reports on NAMT member WaterTower Theatre’s ambitious undertaking, the world premiere musical Creep. The show’s journey wound up involving three NAMT members — our favorite kind of networking success story!

[WaterTower Artistic Director Terry] Martin was so intrigued, he directed a workshop of Creep as part of WaterTower’s annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival in 2010. There was positive feedback, but Martin didn’t think it was ready for a full production….
Uptown Players staged a workshop in 2013 under the direction of Michael Serrecchia, a former star of Broadway’s original Chorus Line, who is now Musical Theatre Program Chair at KD Studio. Fowler added new songs and fresh visual touches, including having ensemble members portray the London fog.
Martin came to see it. He was impressed. There were many reasons not to do it. There were no big or familiar names to promote with the project. Fowler was a first-time musical composer. It was not a star vehicle. The subject matter was dark and, as a mystery, hard to summarize.
Still, Martin wanted to do it….
Putting the pieces together, however, would be tricky. A new musical is tough to finance because everything has to be done from scratch, from the orchestrations to the costumes and sets.
“I knew it could be staged if we got the right people at the table, including a strong director who could bring a fresh eye to it and who had experience developing new musicals,” Martin says.
He asked the National Alliance for Musical Theatre in New York for a recommendation. They suggested Kate Galvin, associate producer of the 11th Hour Theatre Company in Philadelphia.

Read the whole story in The Dallas Morning News.

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New Work In Progress: Creep

This month, we chat with Terry Martin from WaterTower Theatre (WTT) in Addison, TX about their upcoming premiere of the new musical, Creep.
Creep is an original musical with book, music and lyrics by local writer/actor Donald Fowler. It is a musical mystery/thriller set during the time of the mythic Jack the Ripper murders. While completely fictional, the story line weaves in some of the factual things known about the famous murders. The narrative follows a mother, her beautiful young daughter and the mysterious man who suddenly comes into their lives. When savage and puzzling murders begin to take place in and around the Whitehall section of London, anyone and everyone seems capable of murder. With a cast of 18 and an orchestra of 10, the show will be one of the largest WTT had produced in its history.

How did Creep find its way to WaterTower?
The writer Donald Fowler, has been well known to WTT audiences as an actor on our stages almost since our beginning. In 2010, the first draft of the show was presented as a reading at our annual Out of the Loop Fringe Festival. I directed that reading, and it was well-received and generated quite a bit of buzz locally. Based on feedback from that reading, the writer continued to work on Creepand Uptown Players (another local company) did a full staged workshop in 2013. I saw that workshop and began talks with Mr. Fowler about a full realized production at WTT. In order to take it to the next level, in November 2014, I hired Kate Galvin to direct the production and to work with Fowler on refining and reshaping some key elements. Kate has great experience with new musical development and her insight and guidance has been invaluable over the last few months as we move toward the opening of Creep.

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