NAMT's 2008 Festival Lineup to Include Pamela's First Musical
Theater producers from across the world come together for this industry-only event, which was begun with the goal of furthering the development and production of new musicals. Since 1989, the Festival has presented over 200 shows including The Drowsy Chaperone and Thoroughly Modern Millie and 80 percent have found subsequent developmental and full productions, tours and licensing agreements.
The 2008 Festival of New Musicals selections are:
Barnstormer
Book and lyrics by Cheryl L. Davis; music by Douglas J. Cohen
Before Amelia Earhart, there was Bessie Coleman, the first black aviatrix who rose from the cotton fields of Texas and the barbershops of Chicago to conquer the skies of France. Her brief but dynamic life inspired the disenfranchised to pursue their dreams, including
her own nephew, who became a Tuskegee Airman.
Beatsville
Music and lyrics by Wendy Leigh Wilf; book by Glenn Slater
In 1959 Greenwich Village, tragically square Walter Paisley finds that his clay figures, sculpted nudes and papier-mâché busts bring him the acceptance he desperately yearns for. But what if the world discovered that Walter's body of work consists of actual bodies? This A bebop-inflected black comedy/satire is based on the Roger Corman film A Bucket of Blood.
The Cuban and the Redhead
By Robert Bartley and Danny Whitman
Escaping the bloodshed of his native Island, a young Cuban boy sets sail on a turbulent journey that leads him all the way to Hollywood and into the arms of a fiery, redheaded movie star named Lucille Ball. At the climax of The Cuban and the Redhead formerly known as Dance with Me, Desi and Lucy put their money, their trust and their dreams on the line in a gamble to save one thing—their marriage— risking it all on an untested medium called television.
Ordinary Days
Pamela's First Musical
See Rock City & Other Destinations
The Yellow Wood
By Thomas Mizer and Curtis Moore
Ex-slave Mary Fields turns the idea of the real Wild West hero on its head when she travels to 1880s Montana to find freedom, adventure and her long-lost best friend. Along the way, she discovers a gaggle of square-dancing nuns and a town full of cowboys in need of a little lesson in the American Dream.
By Adam Gwon
When Deb loses her most precious possession—the notes to her graduate thesis—she unwittingly starts a chain of events that turns the ordinary days of four New Yorkers into something extraordinary. Told through a series of intricately connected songs and vignettes, Ordinary Days is an original musical about growing up and enjoying the view.
Book by Wendy Wasserstein; lyrics by David Zippel; music by Cy Coleman
Pamela is a young suburban girl who feels out of place. Her mother has passed away and she lives with her father and two brothers who don't understand her. Pamela's active fantasy life and infatuation with Broadway cast CDs keeps her from being too lonely. On her 11th birthday, she learns that her father is about to re-marry. Just when Pamela thinks her entire world is going to crash, her eccentric Aunt Louise, a fashion designer, sweeps Pamela off to New York City and her first Broadway musical.
Book and lyrics by Adam Mathias; music by Brad Alexander
This winner of the 2008 Richard Rodgers Award uses a pop-rock score, to venture to tourist destinations across America from Coney Island to Mt. McKinley, the Alamo to Niagara Falls, mapping out stories of sightseers who need to get a little lost in order to find themselves.
Book by Michelle Elliott; music by Danny Larsen; lyrics by Elliott and Larsen
Seventeen-year-old Adam is frantically trying to memorize Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" before English, but because he didn't take his Ritalin, he can't get much farther than the "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood..." before a fantastic wood begins coming to life in his school. Adam is pulled deeper and deeper into the Yellow Wood, where he must face the reality of who he is and decide who he will ultimately become.