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A magnificent first table reading!

We have a full draft!

And Julia and I gathered a wonderful group of friends and collaborators together to hear the entirety of The Magnificent Seven for the first time.

Thanks to Shaleah Adkisson, Renee Albulario, Delaney Amatrudo, Ian Axness, Ally Bonino, David Friedlander, Holly Gould, Brandon Michael Lowden, Ellen Macy, Lynne Marie Rosenberg, Keith Rubin, and Hana Slevin for a great read and a great discussion.

I’m so excited to get down to work based on the wonderful feedback I already did some rewriting… (And USA Gymnastics is certainly trying hard to keep the sport in the collective consciousness.)

For now, though, it was the perfect way to cap off a creative summer!

A Decade of Collaboration

Ten years ago today, I sent Julia an email.

We’d written a few songs together at warp speed after grad school that we both liked. So when my friend Jeremy Gold Kronenberg told me he was looking for a short musical to direct for Prospect Theater Company but only had 6 weeks to develop it, I asked Julia if she might want to apply our speed songwriting skills to a full project. We cranked out a 35 minute musical and loved what we wrote together. So when I read an article the next month about a group of high school girls in Gloucester, Massachusetts who were rumored to have made a pact to get pregnant together, I asked Julia if she thought it might be our first full-length musical.

Now we’re getting ready to start our seventh full-length musical next month while we’re out of town rehearsing for the world premiere of another show. And in the intervening decade we’ve been lucky enough to build a network of actors, singers, musicians, directors, designers, and friends to help us explore limitless empathy, terrible decision-making, building legacies, and growing up.

Here’s to what’s to come in the next 10 years of our collaboration!

Back in the studio!

Holly Gould & Allison Lian

Julia and I went back into the studio with the cast of our REB+VoDKa+ME NYU workshop over the last few weeks to record the rest of the score! It was great to extend our time with these amazing students, and we’re so excited to have the whole score recorded. Thanks to Chris Gilroy and Mighty Toad Studios for having us back in Brooklyn. And thanks to Rich Silverstein for guiding us all through this epic score, as always. Be on the lookout for mixed tracks sometime in early 2018!

AMTA

Julia and I are pleased to be working with students at The American Musical Theatre Academy (AMTA) on songs from our collection. AMTA was founded in London in 2010 as a training ground for musical theatre performers, and a program began in New York this past fall. Over the next few weeks, along with music director extraordinaire Rich Silverstein, we’ll be spending time with a class of 8 students as they learn our songs (and learn some of the skills needed to work on a new musical. It’s such a fun chance for us to revisit some of our favorite material, and a great way to meet the next generation of musical theatre performers! Thanks to co-founder Christie Miller for getting us involved!