• DM •

D I V Y A

M A U S

C O M P O S E R

S I N G E R - S O N G W R I T E R

V O C A L A R R A N G E R

NEWS

GET OUT AND VOTE!

A few weeks ago, the company 10glo.com – a new networking platform for the musical theatre industry – asked me to write a song for their Get Out the Vote initiative. Together with Daniel Weidlein, I wrote this little ditty and asked the wonderful Marta Olson and Kenton Chen to join me!

Quarantine Songwriting

Colleen Dauncey and I met in 2011 in Chicago at the Johnny Mercer Songwriters Project, both of us as composers who usually set other writers' lyrics to music. This March, Colleen happened to be in Los Angeles (right before the pandemic lockdown hit) and we decided to try something new; I wrote a set of lyrics on my own, she set them to music on her own, and then we came together and figured out how to arrange the song into a three-part vocal with Daniel Weidlein jumping in to round out the trio!

New Musicals & Old Friends

I met Doron JéPaul Mitchell at the first NYU Tisch grad school mixer of our mutual time as masters students there. Doron was a graduate actor at Tisch, and I a graduate musical theatre writer, and we frequently gave moderately intoxicated performances of jazz ballads at the graduate student mixers hosted on one of our department floors.

When I was invited to be featured in one of ContemporaryMusicalTheatre.com's virtual concerts during this pandemic year, I reached out to Doron to ask if he wanted to perform a NEW song of mine from an upcoming musical I'm working on...

Here he is, performing "Annie and Me":

THE MOLLYHOUSE Live Stream

On March 30th of this year, after a two-year stint developing our show in LA, we were bringing THE MOLLYHOUSE back to New York for a staged reading at Wagner College and a concert performance at The Duplex piano bar in the West Village. When both events had to be canceled due to the spread of COVID-19, we decided that, with the help of Daniel Weidlein (Orchestrator & MD extraordinaire) I would perform the entire score of The Mollyhouse by myself (with one notable exception – we facetimed Allie Sandler who slayed "Men" over the phone).

This insane endeavor, however ill-advised, allowed me to explore the relationship between composers and actors; what we composers ask singers to do when they embody our work, how composers rarely experience the extent of what we are asking an actor to do to bring our work to life. Throughout this performance we took moments to reflect on past performances of The Mollyhouse, answered questions, toasted a friend, and remembered past actors and other creatives whose contributions have stayed with us, and what the future has in store for this musical...

–––> Official demos of The Mollyhouse can be found here!