Junk City' winner of National New Musical Award

WESTON — The Weston Playhouse Theatre Company (WPTC) of Weston announced that the new sci fi rock musical, "The Listener of Junk City," with book and lyrics by Liz Duffy Adams and music by John Hodian, is the winner of its second annual Weston Playhouse New Musical Award. The national award, created to support emerging musical theatre composing teams of unique promise, was developed in consultation with Obie-winning author/composer Polly Pen, producer Kurt Deutsch of Sh-K-Boom and Ghostlight Records, and the National Alliance for Musical Theatre.

The Weston Playhouse New Musical Award brings a composing team together with a director, a music director and five Equity actors for a three-day Vermont residency to rehearse 30 minutes of selections from a new musical. The project culminates in a free public concert at the Weston Playhouse and a New York recording session with Kurt Deutsch, after which the creators receive 100 demo CDs to promote their work. All the artists involved are paid on union contracts, and all expenses — including transportation, lodging and meals in Vermont, copying and recording studio rental in New York — are covered.

"The

country's leading developers of new musical work immediately agreed to be nominators for this award," observed Weston Playhouse Producing Director Steve Stettler, "and all the major musical licensors, recently joined by some prominent Broadway producers, have supported it with contributions — clear signs that we're providing a valued service to the field." Nominators include the American Musical Theatre Project, ASCAP Musical Theatre Workshop, BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop, Dramatists Guild Fellows Program, Lark Play Development Center, New Dramatists, New York Musical Theatre Festival, NYU-Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, O'Neill National Music Theater Conference, and Sundance Institute Theatre Program. Funders to date include the Araca Group; Dramatists Play Service, Inc.; Dramatic Publishing; Music Theatre International; the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization; Samuel French, Inc.; Tams-Witmark Music Library; Theatrical Rights Worldwide; and Wayne and Deborah Granquist, Sam and Barbara Lloyd, Marguerite and Peter Mason, Thomas Schumacher, and Rick Twigg.

The 2008 award winner was chosen from national nominations by a Selection Committee including Stettler, Deutsch and Broadway composer Mel Marvin. Also winner of the Frederick Loewe Music Theatre Award, "The Listener of Junk City" is set in the future, in a city built from the trash of a collapsed civilization. Into this world comes a man on a rescue mission, whose presence challenges Junk City's cobbled-together culture. The musical was nominated for Weston's award by New Dramatists in New York for its "vivid characters, rich language and sublime and catchy music." Adams is a recipient of a NY Foundation for the Arts Fellowship whose work has been seen at the Humana Festival and Bay Area Playwrights Festival. Hodian, winner of a NY Emmy for Best Music in a Documentary, has scored hundreds of films and has been a resident composer for the Sundance Theater Institute.

Participants in the Weston concert, held on April 12, and New York recording, slated for April 16, include 2008 Backstage/Bistro award winner Gabrielle Stravelli as The Listener, and actors Bill Gross, Greg Naughton, Will Reynolds and Sandie Rosa. Matt Vinson, an alumnus of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop whose music direction credits include the Atlantic and Prospect Theaters and the New York Musical Theatre Festival, serves as Music Director and keyboardist.

The Weston Playhouse Theatre Company is a non-profit professional theatre supported in part by funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Arts Council, and an ever-growing family of individuals who believe in the impact that the performing arts can have on its community.

For more information about the theatre company and its work, visit www.westonplayhouse.org.