César Alvarez and Sarah Benson talk FUTURITY on NPR (The Leonard Lopate Show)

 photo credit: Ben Arons courtesy of Soho Rep/Ars Nova

Working in the Theatre: Polyphone

The American Theater Wing made a mini-documentary about Polyphone, which is a festival for new musicals I founded with Joanna Settle in 2015 at The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Watch on Vimeo
Watch on YouTube

Musical Theatre of the Future

In February 2017 I went to Norway to talk to experimental LARP designers about making a participatory space musical. I got to share a lot of my beliefs about musicals, participatory theater and transforming the civic sphere with art. You can watch:

Watch it on YouTube
Also check out Lizzie Stark's primer on Nordic Larp HERE.

The Skin of Our Teeth at Theatre for a New Audience

Eric Farber and Fred Epstein | Photo by Henry Grossman 

Photo by Henry Grossman

Photo by Henry Grossman

I wrote original music including 4 songs for TFANA's production of The Skin of Our Teeth by Thornton Wilder. This play summons the eternal story of how humans endure total catastrophe. After working on it for months I feel like I finally arrived at its key insight: that our desperation to survive, the love of our communities and families, and the truth we discover through arts and sciences will always carry us through the darkness.

New York Times Feature: "Why Thornton Wilder Matters in the Trump Era"

New York Times Review: "In ‘The Skin of Our Teeth,’ the End of the World as We Know It"

NOISE

Jenna Rush | Photo by Eric Wolfe

Photo by Eric Wolfe

Photo by Eric Wolfe

NOISE was inspired by a little piece of critical theory, which proposes that music, as the organization of noise, was the earliest expression of civilization. And if music precedes all forms of political economy, it follows that we should be able to make a musical which designs a new and better society. Right? RIGHT?!


NOISE was a commission of Playwrights Horizons Theater School.
Jack Moore of the Public Theater talks about it in this podcast. (Minute 42)


Here's a demo of a song from the show: