New musicals about addiction, marriage and a lethal gambling club get single readings at the 14th annual Festival of New Musicals, hosted Jan. 18 to 20 at Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam. The readings are open to the public.
“The Peculiar Tale of the Prince of Bohemia and the Society of Desperate Victorians” is described as a “darkly hilarious” musical about a prince who joins a secret society and plays “a deadly card game.” It gets a reading on Jan. 18 at 7:30 p.m. (based on short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson, with book and lyrics by Becca Anderson and Dan Marshall and music by Julian Blackmore).
“The Proxy Marriage,” concerning the longtime friendship of two young people who have served for years as stand-ins in “proxy marriages,” will be read Jan. 19 at 7:30 p.m. (book and lyrics by Michele Lowe and music and lyrics by Adam Gwon).
“Devotion” is the story of three people struggling with various problems in a small Ohio town and is described as being “about addiction (not just to drugs) and belief (not just in religion). It is scheduled to be read Jan. 20 at 1 p.m. (music, book and lyrics all by Mark Sonnenblick).
The readings are script-in-hand presentations of musicals that are still works-in-progress. The shows are performed by students from the University of Hartford’s Hartt School and the Boston Conservatory at the Berklee School of Music, with live musical accompaniment.
Tickets for the festival (which includes numerous other events besides the readings) are available at goodspeed.org. Tickets for each reading are $25, $15 for students.
Readings are seen as an important early step in a musical’s development, allowing the work to be heard and appreciated by an audience while it is still actively being created. Chosen works have often already had readings elsewhere. “The Proxy Marriage,” for example, had a developmental reading in 2017 at the American Music Theatre Project at Northwestern University in Illinois and another one at the prestigious Rhinebeck Writers Retreat earlier this year.
Songs from “The Peculiar Tale of the Prince of Bohemia and the Society of Desperate Victorians” (formerly titled “The Suicide Club”) can be heard at Becca Anderson’s website beccawrites.com. A song from “Devotion” can be found at Mark Sonnenblick’s website marksonnenblick.com. There is a video of the song “Other Lives” from “The Proxy Marriage” on YouTube.
The best-known musical to have been read at the festival is “Come From Away,” a Canadian musical about passengers on planes that were diverted from New York City following the World Trade Center attack on 9/11. “Come From Away” has been on Broadway since early 2017, and the national tour of the show will be at The Bushnell in April.
Some musicals read at the festival have gone on to have fuller productions at the Goodspeed itself. One of the musicals in the 2019 season at the Norma Terris Theatre, the Goodspeed’s workshop space in Chester, is “Passing Through” by Brett Ryback and Eric Ulloa. “Passing Through” had a reading at the 2018 festival.
Besides the three readings, the festival weekend includes seminars, cabaret performances, a video screening of a past Goodspeed Opera House production and other events. Those line-ups have not been announced yet.
The Goodspeed Festival of New Musicals dovetails with the annual Johnny Mercer Writers Colony, a month-long writers’ retreat for musical theater creators. Both the festival (which began in 2006 as the Goodspeed Festival of New Artists) and the writers colony (which began in 2013) arose from Goodspeed’s desire to be more of a year-round operation, beyond its main spring-to-winter theater season.
