Projects
Pompeii Rising is Back!
On Wednesday, August 30th, we’ll be presenting a bigger, bolder, more explosive full-length concert of our musical in development, Pompeii Rising! Tickets (and streaming tickets) are available here.
Verse Intro Cabaret
In March 2023, I began co-hosting and producing a new cabaret series for emerging musicals, along with my longtime collaborator Andi Lee Carter. We personally love having cabaret performances of our work, but noticed that the costs have become really prohibitive, especially as the number of available and affordable performance spaces has shrunk post-covid. We partnered with SoHo Playhouse to create a low-cost cabaret without drink minimums, where we can actually pay writers for bringing in their work. Due to its shockingly immediate popularity, this has become a series occurring on the 3rd Sunday of every month. I’ve taken the opportunity to slip in a brief Broadway-themed trivia game at the top of the show. If you’re reading this, I’d love for you to join us on June 18th for the next round!
New Piece!
A new piece I’m writing, The Song of the Earth, recently had an actor lab at NYU’s Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program. A selection from our piece was also included in a showcase at Joe’s Pub on May 22nd. This exploration of how Tang Dynasty poems ended up in Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied Von Der Erde” has been such an interesting piece to write and we hope to bring more of this work to a public performance in the near future.
Celebrating with Theatre Now
Together with my collaborators on Pompeii Rising, Andi Lee Carter and Henco Espag, I have been a member of the Theatre Now Writers Lab for the last two years. For Theatre Now’s 10th Anniversary party, we wrote some special material, and we’ll also have a song from Pompeii for you. If you’d like to come out to this wonderful night at the Players’ on November 14th, you can purchase tickets here: TNNY 10th Anniversary party
Pompeii Rising: In Concert
Our first public performance of material from Pompeii Rising exploded onto the scene on August 24, 2022 at Judson Memorial Church in NYC. My collaborators Henco, Andi and I were so excited to share this new work with our audience, in association with Theatre Now New York.
The Dragon Transfer
In January of 2021, composer Gavin Knittle and I embarked on the task of creating a 30-minute virtual opera as part of the NYU Tisch Advanced Opera Lab, in conjunction with American Opera Project. The Dragon Transfer is a film opera set on the International Space Station. It premiere in December 2021, and can now be viewed on YouTube and TikTok!
Songs of Suffrage
In May 2021, my collaborator Mike Meketa and I contributed a song, “The Spirit of Divine Unrest,” to Songs of Suffrage, a theatrical mosaic of pieces about the Women’s Suffrage movement developed and performed by students at Seton Hill University. To work with the students, even virtually, was a truly instructive experience. Our song explored the life of Laura DeForce Gordon, a 19th century lawyer, publisher, and women’s rights activist whose public speaking abilities came from her upbringing in the Spiritualist movement as a teenage “trance speaker.” I became fascinated by the link between Spiritualism and Feminist activism, and wanted to explore how being given a public speaking platform in a religious context gave DeForce Gordon the courage to seek equality for women in the legislative arena. The phrase “the spirit of Divine unrest” came from one of DeForce Gordon’s speeches, and it struck me as particularly relevant to today.
