WORKSHOPS
THE YEAR THAT NEVER WAS: DEVISING A HOLIDAY SPECIAL
Originally designed by composer/librettists Michael R. Jackson (Pulitzer Prize and Tony Awards, A Strange Loop) and Rachel J. Peters for Princeton University’s Atelier undergraduates, The Year That Never Was invites preprofessional students of all levels of experience into the process of creating a new musical. This wildly eclectic curriculum features the 1970s and 80s TV variety holiday special format as the foundation for bite-sized musicals about brand-new invented holidays.
Nostalgia is at the heart of both musicals and holiday festivities. These vintage shows offer a unique vantage point on the musical theatre continuum all the way back to vaudeville and forward to TikTok. In the pre-digital age, before CGI, HD, and AutoTune, the characters and stories were scrappy, earnest, warm, subversive, weird–and, most importantly, fun! They’re the perfect vehicle to cover concepts and techniques vital to the craft of musical theatre writing: theatre history, song form, music theory, scene structure, collaboration, adaptation, and personal narrative. With this model, students develop unique voices that can outlive trends and technologies.
All holidays have common elements to celebrate the things and people we care about. This musical experiment investigates holiday traditions--gifts, food, carols, and more–without a Christmas context in the newly imagined worlds of some mysterious and absurd obscure holidays on the U.S. calendar: National Awkward Moments Day, Don’t Step On A Bee Day, Hug-A-Kevin Day, and many more are up for grabs!
WHAT WE’LL DO
Each lesson contains examples from classic musicals, variety shows, and a related writing prompt exploring one aspect of a holiday. The class is divided into teams; each team chooses an obscure American holiday from a list and devotes the remaining sessions to creating the characters and traditions of their holidays.
This workshop can flexibly accommodate a range of classroom environments and goals, from a week up to a semester or longer, as your resources allow. Under longer-term instruction, the class transforms into a writers room, collectively building a framework for the results of the prompts toward a cohesive, informal final concert presentation.
“It’s lit. Prepare to have a blast.”
—anonymous Princeton course evaluation
I HAVE SONGS: WRITING SIDEWAYS
Composer/lyricist Rachel J. Peters, mezzo-soprano Kate Tombaugh, and pianist Alan Johnson present a program exploring the compositional concept of “writing sideways”. This practice, made popular by the chart-topping Brill Building songwriters of the mid-20th century and beyond, respectfully borrows technical gestures from familiar material and transforms them to reveal new layers of meaning.
Kate has garnered acclaim for her range of roles in works from Hansel and Gretel to Ariodante to Annie Get Your Gun, to my own opera, Companionship. Alan’s impressive roster of collaborators includes Philip Glass, Anthony Davis, Michael John LaChiusa, Libby Larsen, and so many more. Together, we share our process of collaboratively creating and performing an evolving collection of songs, which Rachel has crafted over decades, and which Kate and Alan have toured for years, paying homage to compositional masters in multiple genres with our own distinct, deeply personal spin.
WHAT WE’LL DO
In a lecture demonstration, we walk audiences through the components of a song built sideways: templates from existing song structures, grooves, melodic shapes, and harmonic progressions; mapping out deliberate collisions of style to subvert expectations, all supporting textual ideas and bringing out performers’ strengths, encouraging a sense of fluidity and play. Our talk culminates in a brief intimate, informal recital of songs—which you can watch here—to be featured on our upcoming I Have Songs EP.
Additionally, for educational settings (college/university/conservatory), we offer a guest residency bringing together teams of aspiring composers, wordsmiths, and performers across departments and specialties to collaborate on their own sideways writing adventures.
“That’s as good as it gets!!!”
—Joshua McGuire, Librettist & Principal Senior Lecturer in Musicianship, Vanderbilt University