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For its practitioners, musical theatre is an art, a passion, and a lifelong love. But its also a complex landscape involving not merely principles of craft about book, music and lyrics but also principles of collaboration, script/demo presentation, project/production development, venue, business andeverybodys area of uncertaintypolitics.
In The Musical Theatre Writers Survival Guide, award-winning musical dramatist and teacher David Spencer provides a guide-to-the-game that helps you negotiate all thoseand more. This professional handbook will walk you through:
If youre taking your first steps, Spencers counsel, anecdotes, and instructions will save you years of blindly stumbling about without results. Likewise, if youve been around the block a few times, The Musical Theatre Writers Survival Guide can rescue you from the kinds of career-stalling traps, bad habits, and false assumptions that lead to dead ends. Finally, if youre just a fan, this is your inside look at how the best musicalsand their writersare built.
DAVID SPENCER won a 2002 Richard Rodgers Development Award (as composer-lyricist for his current project, The Fabulist), a 2000 Kleban lyrics award, and two Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Theatre Foundation grants. He has been the lyricist-librettist for two musicals with composer Alan Menken: Weird Romance and The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. He made his professional debut in 1984 with the English adaptation of La Bohéme at the Public Theatre and has since written music and lyrics for Theatreworks/USAs all-new, award-winning TYA versions of The Phantom of the Opera and Les Misérablesplus the original Alien Nation novel, Passing Fancy. He is on faculty at the BMI-Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop and is webmaster and principal New York drama critic for Aisle Say. He can be emailed at
ScriptConsult@aol.com for script consultation services, readings, public appearances or lectures.