This week, we are honored to welcome Ryan Scott Oliver to the Followspot Podcast Composer Spotlight.
RYAN SCOTT OLIVER is a 2009 Jonathan Larson Grant recipient and wrote the music and lyrics for Mrs. Sharp (2008 Richard Rodgers Award Winner, at Playwrights Horizons July 2009 starring Jane Krakowski, dir. by Michael Greif), Darling(Pace New Musicals 2009), the song cycleOut of My Head, Quit India (commissioned by UCLA), and the music for Angus Oblong’sThe Debbies.
A collection of his work, Rated RSO, was recently seen at New York Musical Theatre Festival and Joe’s Pub, where it will return January 2010 after an engagement at Los Angeles’s Boston Court Performing Arts Center starring Megan Hilty.
His work has been heard on the hit YouTube TV show The Battery’s Down(“This is Your Life” among others) and in showcases presented by Summer Play Festival (SPF), The York Theatre, Goodspeed Musicals, William Finn & Barrington Stages, New York Theatre Barn, Monday Nights New Voices, and the Festival of New American Musicals in Los Angeles.
He is a 2007 Dramatists Guild Fellow and the recipient of numerous awards including the first-ever ASCAP Foundation Harold Adamson Award for Excellence in Lyric Writing, the Margo Lion Award for Excellence in Adaptation (Mrs. Sharp, with Kirsten A. Guenther), the Looking Glass Theatre Favorite Production Award (Out of My Head) and the John Denver New Composers Award.
Originally from Los Angeles, he is currently making music from New York City’s West Village, developing 35mm, a multimedia musical exhibition based on photographs by Matthew Murphy; a commission byBroadway Across America; We the Peoplefor TheatreWorksUSA (premiering Off-Broadway 2010), and preparing for a concert at the Kennedy Center through ASCAP.
B.A. Music Composition, UCLA; M.F.A. Musical Theatre Writing, NYU-Tisch, a proud member of A.S.C.A.P.; Ryan is an adjunctprofessor at Pace University in New York, a voice instructor at Front-n-Center Performing Arts Center in New Jersey, and Artistic Director of the Pasadena Musical Theatre Program in California, where he also teaches Songwriting, Playwriting, and Musical Theatre History.
He is represented by Jessica Amato at The Gersh Agency.
Ryan Scott Oliver Links
- Ryan’s Snazzy Website
- Ryan’s Crazy Town Blog
- Ryan’s Youtube Channel
- Ryan’s Music for purchase HERE or HERE
Make sure to listen to the RSO interview, and listen to sound clips on The Followspot Podcast Episode 18.
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This week, we are honored to welcome Adam Gwon to the Followspot Podcast Composer Spotlight.
Adam Gwon is a rising musical theater writer named one of “50 to Watch” by The Dramatist magazine. He won the 2008 Fred Ebb Award for excellence in musical theater songwriting and has been hailed “an extremely talented composer and lyricist” who “is seriously going places.” (The New York Sun, StageSpace.com)
Adam’s musical Ordinary Days will be produced in the 2009-10 season at Roundabout Theatre Company, South Coast Repertory, Adirondack Theatre Festival, and Human Race Theatre Company. Ordinary Days was previously produced at Pennsylvania Centre Stage, the Finborough Theatre in London, and at universities across the country, and was selected for the 2008 NAMT Festival of New Musicals.
His other shows include The Boy Detective Fails (book: Joe Meno), Bernice Bobs Her Hair (book/lyrics: Julia Jordan), and Ethan Frome (book: Michael Ruby). His work has been seen and developed at Roundabout Theatre Company, Primary Stages, the York Theatre, SIgnature Theatre, the Kennedy Center, Ars Nova, New Dramatists, NAMT,NYMF, the Johnny Mercer Foundation/American Music Theatre Project, Symphony Space, the Disney/ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop, Tribeca Performing Arts Center, the Flea Theater, and many others.
Adam’s other honors include the ASCAP Harold Adamson award, the MAC John Wallowitch award and a MAC Award nomination for best song, as well as commissions from Signature Theatre in Arlington, VA (as part of its American Musical Voices Project: The Next Generation), South Coast Repertory, Broadway Across America, and theEST/Sloan Project.
Adam has been a MacDowell Colony fellow, a musical theater fellow at the Dramatists Guild, and an artist-in-residence at Weston Playhouse. He is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild.
Adam Gwon Links
Make sure to listen to the Meinwald/Shapiro interview, and listen to sound clips on The Followspot Podcast Episode 9.
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This week, we are honored to welcome Meinwald and Shapiro to the Followspot Podcast Composer Spotlight.
ROB SHAPIRO is a composer/lyricist living in Brooklyn. His musicals include Shelter (music by Julia Meinwald), After the Race (Book & Lyrics by Tina Lear) and Help Wanted (Book by Brian Valencia, Music by Hyun Rim Kim). Most recently he wrote music for A Broken Umbrella Theatre’s environmental play Thunderbolt in New Haven.
Rob’s music and lyrics have been heard in various cabarets in New York: Worst Case Scenario: The Songs of Julia Meinwald (Prospect Theatre), The Panda is Not My Friend (Don’t Tell Mama), LoveKiller (The Duplex); William Finn’s Songs by Ridiculously Talented Composers and Lyricists… (Barrington Stages); and Between the Babble(New Haven’s Chow). He has written instrumental music for productions of Scapino, The Laramie Project and Twelfth Night, the films Mastication, A Darker Shade of Dimand the documentary From Massachusetts to Mississippi: Brandeis University and the Civil Rights Movement.
As producer, he has worked with composer/lyricist Ryan Scott Oliver on The Spotlight Cabaret in New York City as well as Rated RSO: The Music + Lyrics of Ryan Scott Oliver at Joe’s Pub and The New York Musical Theatre Festival. He also co-produced the world premiere reading of Women of Colors, a song cycle by Tony Asaro as well as his own cabarets: Open Bar Mitzvah and Easily Distracted. Rob currently works for The Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization and is a member of A Broken Umbrella Theatre.
JULIA MEINWALD is a Queens-based composer. Recent projects include a workshop of her musical Le Fou, with lyricist Rob Shapiro and playwright Bekah Brunstetter at New Georges, and Blank Slate, a ten-minute musical with lyricist Gordon Leary commissioned by Prospect Theatre Company. Prospect produced her one-act Disappeared, also with Gordon Leary, last spring, and the show will be workshop-ed at Lincoln Center Directors Lab this summer. Julia’s music has also been featured at the York Theatre, the Cherry Lane Theatre, the Yale Rep, Barrington Stages, Goodspeed Opera House, and the Hangar Theatre. Her music can be heard in film (Breast Picture with Matt Walsh, The Losers with Josh Gad, Cat on the Prowl with Mary Louise Parker), computer games (Jessica Plunkenstein and the Dusseldorf Conspiracy, The Judgment of Quintus), and dance (Dance New Amsterdam’s Raw Materials, Tze Chun Dance Company.) A proud participant in the New Dramatists 2008 Composer Librettist Development Program, she is now completing a fellowship with the American Lyric Theatre. Julia received her BA in Music from Yale University in 2005, and her M.F.A from NYU Tisch’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program in 2007.
Meinwald and Shapiro Links
Make sure to listen to the Meinwald/Shapiro interview, and listen to sound clips on The Followspot Podcast Episode 8.
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This week, we are honored to welcome Kooman and Dimond to the Followspot Podcast Composer Spotlight.
Michael Kooman and Christopher Dimond met while students at Carnegie Mellon University. Their DANI GIRL, has been workshopped at the Kennedy Center’s New Visions/New Voices Festival, American Conservatory Theatre, the ASCAP/Disney Musical Theater Workshop, CAP-21, and was recently awarded the KC/ACTF Musical Theatre Award. The duo’s song cycle HOMEMADE FUSION has been produced at CMU, the Pittsburgh CLO’s Late Night Cabaret, the Zipper Theater, Monday Night New Voices: Chicago, and has been featured in several NAMT showcases.
Michael and Chris are 2009-2010 Dramatists Guild Fellows and were recently Fellows at the O’Neill Music Theater Conference. They have recently been invited to perform a concert of their music at the Kennedy Center as part of the “Broadway: Today and Tomorrow” celebration. Last August, they attended the Johnny Mercer Songwriting Workshop with mentors Andrew Lippa and Craig Carnelia. Their music has been performed at theaters, cabarets, and colleges throughout the country.
They are proud members of the Dramatists Guild and ASCAP.
Michael Kooman is a dynamic and attractive young man.
Michael Kooman is an active composer and pianist whose music spans the mediums of theater, concert music, and digital media. In 2009, he received the Burton Lane award from the Theater Hall of Fame. His musical scores have included the Carnegie Mellon Productions of The Glass Menagerie, House of Blue Leaves, Ghosts, and Brecht’s Man is Man.
Also active in the concert world, Michael was commissioned to write a piece for the 80th Anniversary season of the Altoona Symphony Orchestra, and his orchestral overture “Two Precepts” was premiered and recorded by the Carnegie Mellon Philharmonic. He is currently a member of the Tony Honored BMI Musical Theater Workshop. As a pianist, Michael accompanies at New York University, and Rosie’s Broadway Kids.
If you like Michael, just wait until you meet Chris.
Chris was a playwright in residence at the Hangar Theatre for his one-act BURYING BARBIE. Other works include HOMELESS: THE MUSICAL, CONFESSIONS OF AN 8th GRADE NOBODY (both with music by Suzanne Polak), THE BLASPHEMY OF BEES, and SHAKESPEARE ON DRUGS (Outstanding Production, Pittsburgh New Works Festival, 2002).
He is the recipient of the ASCAP Harold Adamson Lyric Award, the KC/ACTF Mark Twain Prize for Comic Playwriting (2nd Place), an ASCAPLUS Award, an Alfred P. Sloan Screenwriting Fellowship, the Schubert Fellowship for Dramatic Writing, the Mary Marlin Fisher Playwriting Award, and was a finalist for the John Cauble Award.
Kooman and Dimond Links
Make sure to listen to the Kooman/Dimond interview, and listen to sound clips on The Followspot Podcast Episode 7.
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This week, we are honored to welcome Stuart McMeans to the Followspot Podcast Composer Spotlight.
Stuart McMeans is a composer/lyricist happily churning out music in NYC. Recent works in include Bargains and Blood at the NY International Fringe Festival, The Magnificent Passion of the Home Shopping Hostess; Everyman for Himself (Dixon Place NYC) Non-Sequiturs: A Cabaret (Philly Fringe Festival), Fags and Cellphones: a Musical (Philadelphia Gay and Lesbian Theater Festival), and That’s How it Works at the Philadelphia Ethical Society. Stuart is a member of the Advanced BMI Musical Theater Workshop in NYC.
You can contact Stuart at stuartmuzic@yahoo.com
His site www.stuartmuzic.com is live and awesome!
Make sure to listen to Stuart’s interview, and listen to sound clips on The Followspot Podcast Episode 3.
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Such a great and informative podcast! Anyone who gets to work with Stuart is truly blessed!
Comment by Tricia Tanguy November 15, 2009 @ 12:58 pm