The Year That Never Was (And The Year That Is)
By now, we’ve all stepped deep into…2025. I said what I said. But if we all keep creating, it’s gonna be harder to destroy everything. To that end, here’s what’s gone/going on so far:
In January, I spoke on a panel with my Young People’s Opera Committee colleagues at the National Opera Association conference in Savannah. It was well received, and we are scheming to expand the committee’s reach in various ways! More about that soon.
No Ladies in the Lady’s Book had a new production at Brigham Young University. Check out the beautiful photos on the opera’s page!
Speaking of work with Lisa DeSpain, we are laying down some of our comic arias in the recording studio…including some of Men I’m Not Married To, which is finally about to be available from E.C. Schirmer!
California State University San Bernardino revived its excellent staging of The AIDS Quilt Songbook earlier this month.
And this week, a brand-new production of Staggerwing opens at Southern Orgeon University opens.
Right now, though, I’m spending more time on the “musicals that sound like operas” side of the equation, and I’m very excited to tell you about it.
Midway through a rough 2024, I was invited to co-teach a class with Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop, White Girl in Danger, Teeth) at Princeton University’s Atelier. Briefly, the point of that program is for artists to bring students into their own creative process. I knew it would be meaningful to reunite (we wrote “the other Spring Awakening” for our MFA thesis at NYU) and make something bigger than the occasional standalone song again. But I did not anticipate transforming the concept into a program flexible enough to recreate elsewhere. Nothing makes me happier than working alongside our students, creating a holiday special together in the tradition of 1970s/80s TV variety shows, and on the continuum from vaudeville to today’s forms of entertainment. The holidays are obscure enough to sound fake, chosen by each writing team from a real list, and they invented their whole stories themselves. Along the way, they got some theatre history, some music theory, a thorough exchange of intergenerational ideas, and probably too many digressions. In the spirit of The Carpenters et al, we told them before each week’s writing prompt to “keep it warm and weird.” And hoo boy, have they delivered! We are about to unleash the first iteration of The Year That Never Was: a Trash Day Special in a closed class presentation soon. Beyond the many educational settings that could house another round of holidays, we ultimately seek to develop the work further into a long-running professional production. I understand precisely how improbable this is, but if you are intrigued enough by our idea to explore it at your school or theatre, please reach out, and I’ll provide more details.
UPDATE: Our performance has concluded, and you can see some photos here. And scroll down for a video of (what we think will be) our opening number.
If you are a practitioner or aficionado of musicals, you probably know that our teacher, Bill Finn, passed away last week. He was a unique and complicated guy, to say the least, and the impact of his work and life on ours is indelible. There’s been a lot of tearful revisiting of In Trousers especially. As we’ve rehearsed for our upcoming Princeton presentation, I’ve reflected on past experiences with him in grad school and beyond. I remembered grumbling to myself in his lyric writing class whenever—and this was more often than not—the assignment was to write a song about whatever holiday was coming up or had most recently passed. While I could always supply enough quirky lived details to make something out of it, and certainly many of my classmates made beautiful work, I was usually more excited by other potential topics. And now, 20 years later, here I am, eager to dedicate my foreseeable future to a project about…holidays. What I didn’t realize at the time was that (at least I hope) Bill didn’t just look at the calendar five minutes before class and decide that was the assignment for the week. Holidays are a way of investigating what and whom we genuinely value, what are we actually nostalgic for, what we can do together, and how we treat each other. I don’t recall him ever saying that plainly, but he obviously felt it as so many of his own shows demonstrate. And that’s the raison d'être of The Year That Never Was…in a world where “I am disposable/And so are you!”, how do we figure that out?
Okay, Bill. You win. Thank you, and rest in peace.
Well, folks, in this insane moment, please vet your sources, freeze your credit reports, hold your loved ones close, and keep it warm and weird.
