Bob Klein created Show Search, a nationwide competition where high school and college students submitted 10-minute musicals on YouTube. Six finalists got mentorship from Broadway writers like David Zippel and Ryan Scott Oliver, then an all-expenses-paid trip to LA for professional casting and rehearsal. Each show received $1,000, with winners getting $1,000 more.
Chapters
If you want to compose for musical theater, if you want to write lyrics for musical theater, you want to write books for musical theater, you got practically nowhere to go. As I may not be as accurate as I can be, I know that Ryan Scott Oliver teaches creating musical theater at Pace University in New York City. William Finn, one of our idols, teaches musical theater at NYU. Somebody teaches a course at Northwestern. I don't know that it's a curriculum, but somebody teaches a course at Northwestern. And then the BMI workshop still lives. And I've run out of places for kids to go who want to create musical theater. Well, that's become our mission.
It's a great mission.
And last year, we created a project called Show Search. And Show Search was the first nationwide search for new short musicals created by high school and college age kids. So we got the word out. We had responses from 40 states, Tim. Not only did we have responses from 40 states, but when we sit down, we said, okay, level playing field. You must all put your 10-minute musical up on YouTube. It must not have any editing, and it must not have any elaborate production. You know, you can have simple costumes, a few props, but that's it. Okay. When we started looking at them, two things astonished us. One, how much quality was out there, and two, how original they were, how little they aped Broadway, and how much they were about these kids. We had, we had 6 finalists, 3 high school, 3 college. First, we gave them a month of mentoring with top professionals, and the top professionals included David Zippel from City of Angels, and Jeff Barks from Avenue Q, and David Shire, and Ryan Scott Oliver. We had 6, and they, by phone, by Skype, in person, whatever worked out, they worked for a month. And based upon the reaction from both the kids and the mentors, it was just one of the best experiences all of them ever had. They just were just in clover with the whole thing. And so they worked on their shows, and then we flew them all expenses paid to Los Angeles, and for 2 days they got to participate in the rehearsals of their shows. We had cast it professionally, so we did— we had a company of 10 that were going to do all 6 shows. And Michael Donovan, who was a great casting director in LA who was also on our board, and he cast it brilliantly. But you can't miss anymore in LA, you know? And then when they weren't in rehearsal, we had like a whole schedule of professional people that they should sit down with and work with. Each of the shows was given a $1,000 grant to continue the work, and The 2 winners were each given an additional $1,000. That's what we spent our money doing. And now we are busy raising money to do Show Search 2.0.
And when will that take place, in 2014?
As soon as we get the money. Okay. We have some, but we don't have enough. And so we're— that's what we're busy doing. But everything about it worked.
Is it okay to talk about how much something like this costs to put on?
Yeah, absolutely. It cost us about $80,000 to do. And we wouldn't change a thing. And the whole idea of charging anybody to do it is just, to me, reprehensible. I wouldn't do anything like that. This is our job, this is our mission, this is what we do. My hope is eventually that we will persuade at least one university, or maybe a collaboration of a university and a and a junior college to institute a full 4-year curriculum in creating musical theater, and that they will take Show Search in as a summer program on their campus, and that when the summer is over and you get to September, and from September to May, we will operate a thing called the Development Center, the DC, which will be the first full-time development center for new musicals.
