Presenting Yeston a lifetime achievement award, Encompass celebrated his career contributions with performances of his work by special guests including Tommy Tune, Karen Akers and Yeston himself.

About the Encompass New Opera Theatre
Encompass New Opera Theatre is dedicated to creating, developing and producing imaginative productions of new music theatre and contemporary opera. Striving to discover and nurture emerging artists, premiere groundbreaking new productions, and revive important 20th century operas by outstanding American and international composers, Encompass has produced over 50 fully-mounted operas with orchestra and staged readings of more than 150 new works, from jazz and cabaret to musicals and opera.

For more information about the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop or to download past issues of the newsletter, visit BMI's Musical Theatre page.

“We are honored to have Jerry Bock generously share his wisdom and his guidance in selecting the award and meeting with the winners,” said Jean Banks, Senior Director of the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop.

Jack Lechner has a varied career in the entertainment business: He was an executive producer on the Oscar-winning Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War; on Parking Lot, a reality series for the Trio Network; on the Emmy-nominated HBO documentary Left of the Dial; and a songwriting contributor to the 2003 film View from the Top. Lechner won the 2004 Jerry Harrington Award For Outstanding Creative Achievement in Musical Theater. Jack’s non-fiction book, Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You: One Man, Seven Days, Twelve Televisions, was published by Crown in November 2000.

Andy Monroe has been cited by The Village Voice as one of “the most talented openly gay singer-songwriters in the country.” They called his song-cycle, Days Of Hope And Circumstance, “a raw cri de coeur…undeniably moving.” In addition, he has recorded three solo albums: Joyful Noise: Disc One, Joyful Noise: Disc Two, and the dark and brooding Rain. As a composer for musical theatre, Andy wrote the score for The Tragic and Horrible Life of the Singing Nun, which premiered at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2006. He also contributed songs to the successful revue Sex — The Musical. Monroe won the 2002 Jerry Harrington Award for Outstanding Creative Achievement in Musical Theatre.

Michael Zam teaches screenwriting at NYU and Modern British Drama at NYU in London (Teaching Excellence Award, 1998 and 2007). He also created the successful Professional Certificate in Screenwriting, the first on the East Coast. He is a former American Film Institute Fellow where he won the top screenwriting prizes. His articles have appeared in numerous publications, including Details, Time Out, and indieWIRE. Michael is an alumnus of BMI’s Librettist Workshop. Currently he’s penning a stage adaptation of the novel Selfish & Perverse by Bob Smith for director Jerry Mitchell, and developing screenplays for major studios with Jaffe Cohen.

The Kid is based on the memoir by Village Voice columnist Dan Savage. The new musical, which explores the real-life adoption by Savage and his partner Terry, has been announced as part of The New Group’s (a not-for-profit producing organization) 2010 season.

The BMI Foundation, Inc. is a not-for-profit corporation founded in 1985 to support the creation, performance, and study of music through awards, scholarships, commissions and grants. Tax-deductible donations to the Foundation come primarily from songwriters, composers and publishers, BMI employees and members of the public with a special interest in music. Because both the Foundation staff and the distinguished members of the Advisory Panel serve without compensation, over 95% of all donations and income are used for charitable grants.

The musical, executively produced by Tony Award winner Lou Spisto and adapted from both the book and film by Rupert Holmes, has been, quite literally, years-in-the-making. For Holland-Dozier-Holland, channeling their pop-jewel savvy into penning new musical numbers offered welcome new challenges. Eddie Holland told the Los Angeles Times (pdf): “Broadway has been a whole new challenge to us. It gets harder and harder to find something that gets you up and going. This has added new life.”

The trio reunited especially for the production—a creative homecoming of sorts for three of popular music’s most prolific creators.

Bound for Broadway, The First Wives Club will continue its run at the Old Globe Theatre through August 23. Performances are Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m.; Thursday, Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; and 2 p.m. Saturday and Sundays. For tickets, please visit www.TheOldGlobe.org.

Sponsorship for the Workshop is fully covered by BMI, at no cost for participating writers. The purpose of the Workshop is to bring writers together to work under the guidance and supervision of experienced professionals in order to develop new creative talent in American musical theatre. A springboard for new works, the Workshop creates a learning environment for members to experiment, take risks and learn from moderators and other participants.

Applications for the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop can be downloaded here, or requested by emailing theatre@bmi.com. Applications should include:

Composer: Three (3) contrasting compositions on CD, up-tempo, comedy song, ballad. Please include copy of score that includes lyrics.

Lyricist: Three (3) contrasting lyrics – up-tempo, comedy song, ballad.

Composer/Lyricist: Three (3) contrasting songs on CD - up-tempo, comedy song, ballad. Please include copy of score that includes lyrics.

Please send completed applications to:

Jean Banks
BMI
320 West 57th Street
New York, NY 10019

But clearly this composer and lyricist-book writer complement each other artistically. Their most recent collaboration -- the Broadway musical Next to Normal, about the effect of a woman’s bipolar disease on her family -- won the 2009 Tony Award ® for Best Original Score for a Musical, garnered Michael Starobin and Kitt the Tony for Best Orchestrations, and Alice Ripley, as Diana, the Tony for Best Actress in a Musical.

“There’s a lot of trust,” says Yorkey about the men’s teamwork.

“There’s a balance,” Kitt adds, as they sit late one afternoon in the downstairs lounge of the Booth Theatre, where Next to Normal is ensconced.

Yorkey concurs. “Tom is one of the most honest, heart-felt people I know,” he says. “A lot of the sincerity you see in the show’s father, Dan, is Tom to music. I’m more of a cynic. I often walk around with a little dark cloud above my head. Sometimes that leads to conflict, but usually it leads us to see both sides of a character or a story beat, to balance the sunshine and the dark.”

Kitt, who is 35, and Yorkey, 38, traveled different routes to musical theater.

Kitt grew up in Long Island and Westchester, trained as a classical musician – much like the daughter in Normal – and nurtured ambitions of becoming a pop singer-songwriter.

Yorkey, a long-time fan of musician and satirist “Weird Al” Yankovic, admits to writing new, mostly unprintable words to existing songs. “The idea of putting words to music was something I liked early on,” he says.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska, which “didn’t have a huge musical theater tradition,” Yorkey grew up listening to his family’s cast albums and learning the shows’ characters and plots through the songs. “That’s where it started for me,” he says.

Their paths converged during the 1990s as undergrads at Columbia University, where they wrote music and songs for two editions of the Varsity Show. “As soon as Brian and I wrote our first score together,” says Kitt, “I knew I wanted to pursue musical theater seriously.”

Next to Normal was born in 1998 at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Workshop. The pair’s final project for the workshop was to write a ten-minute musical, and one evening Yorkey was watching a Dateline NBC report about a woman struggling with depression and undergoing electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). He picked up the phone, called Tom, and despite the unlikely musical subject, the two were off.

The show’s original title, Feeling Electric, vanished along the way. But the first song they wrote – the delicate waltz “I Dreamed a Dance,” with the first notes emerging when Diana opens a music box – remains.

“I wrote the lyric to that,” Yorkey remembers, “and Tom wrote the music and called and played it over the phone, and – ‘Oh, my gosh, that’s great.’ We knew it would be a music box.”

Do composers and lyricist-book writers ever work together in neat, orderly fashion? Not Kitt and Yorkey.

Script? Outline?

“You would think,” says Yorkey with a trace of sarcasm. But no. “We went backwards.”

They would write a ton of songs, then do a reading, and, says Kitt, “It was like a jigsaw puzzle: ‘Well, this could work here...’ We had some beats that were married to each other, and moments that we thought would be in the story, but we didn’t go in any strict order.”

“Yeah,” nods Yorkey. “Which, for the record, we don’t recommend.”

Other projects intervened, including Kitt’s rendezvous with the ill-fated 2006 musical High Fidelity. But after accumulating about thirty songs, they buckled down to write the show.

Still, their creative process is fluid. Sometimes, if a moment needs to evoke a specific feeling in an audience, Kitt will write a piece of music and then Yorkey will put lyrics to it. But if it’s a narrative song, Yorkey might do a lyric first.

“I Miss the Mountains,” the poignant song Diana sings in Act I when she realizes that medication has deadened her life, came to Yorkey during a layover at the Denver airport. “I was staring out at the Rockies and I thought of the phrase. I got onto the plane, wrote that and e-mailed it to Tom. The music is perfect. Sort of John Denverish, a feeling of wistfulness and open space.”

In 2008, while Next to Normal was playing off Broadway at Second Stage, Kitt and Yorkey returned to BMI at the invitation of lyricist Richard Engquist, to talk about the show’s growth. The production’s reception had been positive, but not the raves the team had hoped for. Going back to their roots at BMI, the men spoke about what they had learned and were continuing to discover after ten years with their creation.

Fluidity has its place, but without a steadfast director (Michael Greif) and a committed producer (David Stone), Kitt and Yorkey believe their unlikely musical would never have made it to Broadway.

“A musical takes time,” says Yorkey. “They’re hard to get right. If you push them before they’re ready, they don’t work.”

“They push back,” says Kitt.

Giant. Like its name, the story and cultural waves left in its wake are larger than life. A best-selling novel by Edna Ferber, the epic tale became a blockbuster film directed by George Stevens, starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. Now, audiences will experience Giant as a musical from BMI composer, lyricist and librettist Michael John LaChiusa.

LaChiusa acknowledges the challenges presented by the project, musing, “25 years of a complicated marriage of a Texas ranching scion and a Virginia belle, the yet-to-be-resolved issues of Mexican-Americans relations, the political and economic implications of the oil industry and Texas politics. How the heck does one make a musical out of all these things?”

Initially, LaChiusa was skeptical about writing the show when he was first approached by Julie Gilbert, Ferber’s great-niece and Literary Executor. When he realized the show’s scope needed three acts rather than the usual two act format, he enlisted the help of playwright Sybille Pearson, his teaching colleague at NYU who also penned the libretto for Broadway musical Baby.

The resulting collaboration recently concluded its triumphant initial tryout at Virginia’s Signature Theatre, and there are plans for another regional production of the musical as it continues on its promising journey to Broadway.

LaChiusa joined the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop during Lehman Engel’s final year, and he describes the experience as “truly one of the most remarkable things in my life.” In addition to Engel, LaChuisa credits Edward Kleban, Maury Yeston, Richard Engquist and Ellen Fitzhugh for their nurturing and encouragement.

In the case of Fitzhugh, a mentor became a collaborator, and the two are currently expanding their one-act musical, Tres NIños—seen at the Zipper Factory last season—into a full length work entitled Los Otros. LaChiusa is also working more with Pearson: They are in the midst of completing a commission from the Metropolitan Opera which he describes as “‘Scheherazade’ set in Argentina.” They anticipate a workshop/sing-through within a year.

In addition to teaching at NYU, LaChiusa has garnered Obie awards for his musicals First Lady Suite and Hello Again and is a five-time Tony nominee for his Broadway musicals The Wild Party and Marie Christine, as well as his contributions to Chronicle of a Death Foretold.

In the classroom, he encourages his NYU Masters’ program students to apply for the BMI Workshop as an invaluable last step before entering the real world of musical theatre. “The Workshop is where they learn to polish,” he explains, “and get cojones and guts.”

Songwriting runs in The Sherman Brothers’ family. Their grandfather Samuel Sherman was court composer for nineteenth century Polish Emperor Franz Josef, and their father was Tin Pan Alley tunesmith Al Sherman. When Al sensed growing competition between his sons, he encouraged them to write songs together. The two sat down and came up with a hit, “Tall Paul,” recorded by Disney Mouseketeer Annette Funicello. Walt Disney was impressed, and the brothers spent two decades as Disney house writers, where their music added magic to films including The Parent Trap, The Sword in the Stone, and Mary Poppins, for which they also received two Oscars.

Pictured are (l-r): Richard Sherman, Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, and Robert Sherman.

Through six decades and more than 1,000 songs, the prolific brothers wrote for Broadway (Over Here, John Travolta’s Broadway debut), as well as live-action and animated Hollywood musicals (Aristocats, The Jungle Book, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Tom Sawyer). “It’s a Small World,” written for the 1966 New York World’s Fair, is one of the most performed songs ever.

Robert’s son Jeffrey, a film and television writer, composer and producer, and Richard’s son Gregory, an Emmy Award-winning television writer, composer, and producer, co-produced and co-directed the documentary The Boys. The cousins explore their fathers’ turbulent relationship, revealing that the composing legends’ harmony dissolved when the two were not writing together. More evidence in the fraternal tension is revealed through Jeffrey and Gregory themselves, who grew up a mere seven blocks from each other but did not meet until they were adults. In the film, Jeffrey hypothesizes that the acrimony between his father and uncle may very well be the secret to the potency of their songs. BMI composer Alan Menken, alumnus of the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop and heir to the Shermans’ throne at Disney, is also one of the many notables interviewed.

As poignant as it is probing, The Boys pays homage even as it seeks to understand the dynamic behind two of music history’s most prolific masters.