Charlie Sohne and Tim Rosser explain how musical theatre creators get their work seen: through development festivals like O'Neill and Yale, where audiences watch multiple iterations; NAMA's New Works Festival, which stages polished 45-minute excerpts; or the commercial route, where a producer guides a project through readings and funding to production.
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There's a fair amount of money in musical theater for development, and production is a harder thing, I think, to come by. So for us, we've really only been through— and we were really lucky— but like development experiences. So basically the way it works is, you know, you write a show, you finish it hopefully. They have these out-of-town festivals, so the O'Neill Yale, Williamstown, Sundance Theatre Lab. They basically put you up for a couple weeks with a cast and a director and everything that you need to see the show on its feet. And they— all of these theaters are around these communities that have people who love seeing new work, and they come and they see new work and they get really excited about, like, Meeting, like seeing a piece, meeting the people, and like giving feedback and asking questions. They're sort of the best audiences that you could ever ask for because they're people who would come to see a reading, you know, or would come to see a workshop with no sets or costumes or anything like that.
And they're active audience, like they're active listeners.
Yeah.
They're not like, amuse me.
Yeah, it's pretty—
they want to be engaged with it and they come wanting to be engaged. Yeah, it's wonderful.
And they love I think, you know, it's the sort of person who also loves being able to have seen it when and then like come and see the next version of it and go, you know, oh, you changed that. Like, why did you change that? That's terrible. Like, bad decision. You know, those places do give you exposure to producers. It's a very safe environment though. It's not like floods and hordes of producers are coming and like judging your work. I think the next step passes or opportunities in the city for really telling an audience, we're ready to have it produced here. You know, this is not for us to seat up on its feet and make a bunch of changes. And we just— there's one that's really amazing called the National Alliance of Musical Theatre, and they have a new works festival every year, and we just did that where they have all these member theaters from across the country and they put 45 minutes of your show up at New World Stages for two separate times and just, you know, it's not a development process. No one's giving you notes or anything like that. It's just like, get it up, you know, in as slick a form as you can. And they're very good about supporting you in that. That's really, I think, the path for for a new musical is. And that's sort of actually the nonprofit angle. Then there's the sort of commercial angle where a producer could come in basically at any time and sort of shepherd a project through funding readings and then eventually doing a backers audition or workshop. So it's sort of a similar thing except you tend to have one person guiding it rather than different organizations that sort of step in at different times.
