The Rise of Festivals: The Networking Life
Festivals aren't just for scouting hits—they've become havens for feeding the country with new works
By Terry Berliner
Can you pinpoint the moment when theatre festivals came to be considered hotbeds for the next hit musical? Here's a good guess: Thursday, September 20, 2001. That's the day Urinetown: The Musical officially opened on Broadway, completing its unlikely trek from a funky downtown New York City fringe festival to an Off Broadway venue and then an award-winning commercial run.
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Festivals aren't exactly a new idea, but in recent years they've grown in both number and importance as a one-stop shopping place for producers and scouts. Some of the shows that have followed in Urinetown's footsteps to Off-Broadway solvency have been quirky entertainments with attention-getting titles—The Joys of Sex, Debbie Does Dallas, Altar Boyz, The Great American Trailer Park Musical—but in point of fact, the downtown-to-uptown commercial transfer is just one example of how the festival concept serves the larger musical-theatre world.
Festivals are really a nexus between artists and producers. They offer a process that allows for a musical to get from the page to the stage, not just to Broadway and Off Broadway, but also theatres across the country and beyond. What most people don't realize is that many musicals that have launched in festival settings have followed divergent paths to success, artistic and economic. Such varied properties as Thoroughly Modern Millie, Children of Eden, The Flight of the Lawnchair Man and Princesses all got their first outings under festival auspices. Each of the three major groups devoted to producing festivals of new musicals—the National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT), the New York Musical Theatre Festival (NYMF) and the National Music Theater Network (NMTN)—go about the work of offering developmental opportunities in different ways, but as breeding grounds for new musical productions they actually share more in common than just their similar acronyms.
National Alliance for Musical Theatre
Eight new musicals are chosen each year for the two-day National Alliance for Musical Theatre presentations, which regularly take place in september or October in New York City. More than 125 new musicals are submitted by NAMT's member theatres, individual producers and literary agents. A lucky few are chosen and then tailored into a 45-minute reading format. Each excerpt is presented twice for audiences filled with commercial, independent and resident-theatre producers from across the country.
In short, it's "a producer's marketplace," says NAMT executive director Kathy Evans, an industry event open by invitation to people who have the position or the wherewithal to move a new musical along.
Over the past 17 years of NAMT's 20-year existence, many individual producers and resident theatres have found new material in NAMT's festival, ranging from The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin to Songs for a New World. This season, writer and actor Bob Martin has credited the alliance as the springboard for his show The Drowsy Chaperone, which was produced by Los Angeles's Center Theatre Group and is now slated to open on Broadway May 1. I Love You Because, which was presented last year at NAMT, opened in February at the Village Theatre in New York City.
Because its festivals aren't open to the general public, recognition for NAMT has remained limited to those in the know. For them, the value of NAMT festivals is clear: The organization supplies the venue, all technical support, a consulting producer from its membership, a casting director and discounted rehearsal-space rental, not to mention access to the press and the audience. Equity determines a 29-hour rehearsal and performance period for the staged reading. Actors receive $100, directors and stage managers get a small stipend, and the show's writers can distribute CDs and copies of their scripts to the very people who can actually give a new musical some legs.
"NAMT is a kind of champion for the writer," Evans says. "We try to make the marketplace personal by providing the interaction between writers and producers." NAMT offers its festival alumni writers a network system: They have access to their own section of the website and can communicate with NAMT's member producers. NAMT also functions as a liaison throughout the year. A member theatre (such as 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle, TheatreWorks in California, North Shore Music Theatre in Massachusetts or the Human Race Theatre Company in Ohio) might contact NAMT and say, "I'm looking for a new musical with a cast of four." With its huge directory of past festival offerings, NAMT can immediately offer suggested titles and contact information.
The New York Musical Theatre Festival
The New York Musical Theatre Festival is now in its third year of existence. Its bold appearance on the scene two seasons ago shocked many observers because of its hip marketing, its size (three weeks of new musical after new musical) and the incredible buzz it generated. Everyone I knew was heading to an NYMF presentation. In 2005, its second year, this veritable rookie took home the 2004 Jujamcyn Theaters award, a $100,000 prize given annually to a resident theatre organization that "has made an outstanding contribution to the development of creative talent for the theatre."
NYMF does not produce or fund new musicals—that burden is on the creators or their producers. Some projects in the festival have already been produced outside of New York, although a majority have not been produced before. Nevertheless, full-scale productions have emerged from NYMF presentations, including Altar Boyz and The Great American Trailer Park Musical.
Most musicals don't just fly out of the writer's hands onto the stage. Since its conception in 1997, Trailer Park had been presented for years in various formats, but book writer Betsy Kelso and composer David Nehls had a difficult time finding anyone to put the show up. In the fall of 1999, a producer had briefly optioned it but never followed up. Kelso says she was resigned to just putting the show in a drawer—until she decided to submit it to NYMF. One year after it was presented at the 2004 festival, the show debuted Off Broadway, underwritten by producers Jean Doumanian and Jeffrey Richards, among others.
With Kris Stewart as executive director, NYMF receives more than 350 script submissions each year between January and march. These are read by a panel that includes directors, dramaturgs, performers and other professionals. Eighteen finalists are chosen for the fall festival.
NYMF offers infrastructure, economic support and a kind of community. Economics of scale are realized, since five different theatres are presenting a range of new shows, says NYMF executive producer and head of programming Isaac Robert Hurwitz. "Marketing all of the shows together gives every show more attention. Since it's a large festival, it allows each show to stand out more than if it is a single one-off presentation at a small downtown theatre." Though many shows have press reps already attached, NYMF does a P.R. blitz, offering shows at the unheardof ticket price of $15. Last year all 18 of the NYMF productions were reviewed.
Most NYMF offerings take the Equity showcase route, far and away the least expensive way to produce a show in New York City. The showcase contract allows for four weeks of rehearsals (from first rehearsal to first paid performance), and presentation in a 99-seat house with a maximum bottom line stipulated by Equity of $20,000 per production.
NYMF offers six performances of each show. It promises to bring in the audience and potential producers so that the writers' time can be spent doing what they do best—making the piece better, as opposed to calling every producer they've ever met, and then crossing their fingers that someone who can help will actually show up on the one or two afternoons that the reading is presented.
At NYMF, says Hurwitz, "artists get more bang for their buck, because a limited run, where tickets are hard to snag, can help generate a lot of buzz. That can be a great way to build support for a project."
National Music Theater Network
The 23-year-old National Music Theater Network bears strong similarities to the two organizations already discussed, in that it aims to feed resident theatres across the country with a trove of new musical works. The difference is that NMTN does this through "regional theatre affiliates," says its founding president Tim Jerome, rather than National Alliance for Musical Theatre's member-theatre structure. (In fact, New York Musical Theatre Festival began as an outgrowth of the long-established NMTN, after Kris Stewart, then executive director of the latter organization, came up with the idea in 2004.)
NMTN's current offerings, which it dubs "Directors' Choice" awardees, are presented in NYMF's annual lineup. From there, Jerome says he hopes to further the life of these new shows by presenting them in "a network of regional festivals, which will include colleges and universities." Jerome has also been working with Charles Repole, a professor of theatre at Queens College of CUNY, to create a program in which "students would get to work on the development of a new musical with a professional director."
If all this sounds rather complicated, that's because the role of NMTN has changed and evolved over the years. Says Jerome: "Our mission is to decentralize the new-works development 'industry' by bringing new musicals to the regions so that audiences can start to tune into the fact that the term doesn't just refer to what opened on Broadway that year. Most of the finest works that are submitted to NMTN are smaller-sized musicals, very well suited for production in regional theatres. They're not spectacles—they are plot-, character- and melody-based."
The network's mission arises from Jerome's practical experience as an actor. "Who we are and what we bring to the personalities of the characters we portray often affects how a musical develops," he says. He is also acutely aware of the many workshops he participated in that never went forward. "No matter what we do, even with really good properties, almost all of them seem to hit the glass ceiling," he recalls. "Nobody wants to take a risk." Before the network began its work in 1982, "the writers were not being supported to any sufficient extent by the regional community," Jerome says.
"They weren't getting enough opportunities to develop and present work outside of New York." He also notes that many resources were not being tapped. "Literary agents with a list of signed writers were reluctant to submit their work to regional producing organizations because there wasn't enough money in it. They were waiting for Broadway or commercial opportunities. What the new-musicals field needed was quality feedback—no matter where the writer lived, he or she should be able to access the professional theatre community and get response."
Jerome enlisted 25 directors, dubbed the "NMTN evaluation committee," to develop an "evaluation report form." Twenty-four years later, hundreds of director-volunteers on the committee continue to use the same form. Thousands of script evaluations and tens of thousands of hints on how to improve new works have been provided to aspiring new-musical writers. This script evaluation service now costs $50 and is open to all.
A second part of NMTN's scheme was to focus on ways to attract attention to the best works that were discovered through its evaluation program. Over the years, various forms of presentation were tried out, from annual concerts of excerpts to full-length readings in an annual series called "The Broadway Dozen." In 1988, John Znidarsic, NMTN's executive director at the time, approached Jerome with a new idea: the songbook series, which would focus on the creators of the new works themselves rather than on individual shows. The series was such a success that Znidarsic had since moved on to create his own popular series for arts and artists at St. Paul's at the New York Public Library's Donnell Library Center.
Jerome hatched the "Director's Choice" idea in 1997—since then, three shows have traveled each year from New York to be performed at "regional affiliate" theatres. Since 1998, NMTN's guest artistic directors for the winning shows have included Patricia Birch, Graciela Daniele, Walter Bobbie, Martin Charnin, Gabriel Barre, John Rando and Kathleen Marshall.
In spite of several successful regional experiments, Jerome reports that he has been having a hard time getting the program fully funded. He has hopes that the network's relatively new relationship with NYMF will benefit both organizations. "NMTN produces festivals—it doesn't 'develop' new works in the strict sense," says Jerome. "When developing new work you can't do 30—or even three—a year. You can probably do one. So we need many development organizations to bring new musicals to life. The country could use more of them."