Other Stuff

Fifteen years ago today I sent an email to someone I’d gone to grad school with to see if she might want to write a short musical together. My good friend Jeremy Jones-Kronenberg had the chance to direct a one-act for Prospect Theatre Company and wanted to do something new but the catch was that performances were in six weeks. I’d written a handful of songs quickly with Julia Meinwald so I reached out to her… And the rest is, well, my own personal history.

The last fifteen years have included 5 full-length musicals, 5 short musicals, 13 productions (including 3 world premieres!), 17 readings, 8 writers’ groups, 7 residencies & retreats, and over 200 songs (211 at last count but I’m probably missing some!) And we have a good four or five shows at various stages on the horizon that will hopefully carry us through another fifteen years of wonderful collaboration!

To musicals!

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!