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Showing posts with label 2014 Festival of New Musicals. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2014 Festival of New Musicals. Show all posts

Friday, August 01, 2014

Next Week: 2014 Village Originals’ Festival of New Musicals

The 2013 developmental production of Watt?!? (starring Hugh Hastings - front) during Festival of New Musicals (photo by Sam Freeman)
The annual musical development party is almost here. Village Theatre’s robust Festival of New Musicals is a well-established, nationally and internationally known, incubator of musicals, many of which move on to more development. Often, one of the festival’s musicals makes it to Village’s next Main Stage season. Once in a while, excitingly, one makes it to Broadway! Two were next to normal and Million Dollar Quartet. That hope fuels everyone’s ambitions.

The format, now, is five draft musical “readings” (unmemorized, but rehearsed, with music stands and zero to rudimentary costuming) and one musical that gets a “developmental” production, with full staging and memorization, though only a two weekend run.

The developmental production this year had its debut last summer as a reading: The Noteworthy Life of Howard Barnes is created by book and lyrics writer Christopher Dimond and composer Michael Kooman. This is a delightful story that will tickle the funnybone of musical theater lovers, with some inside jokes. Why? Well, the press release says, “Howard Barnes is a perfectly average American guy; he likes baseball and grilling things. That is, until he wakes up to discover that his life has become a musical.” It’s actually not so fun to have your life be a musical and Howard has to go on a quest to find the person who knows how to escape from Musical Land.