Playbill: Your new favorite show may be just around the corner! The 34th Annual National Alliance for Musical Theatre (NAMT) Festival has returned to Off-Broadway's New World Stages, with eight new musicals being presented October 20 and 21. The Festival of New Musicals presents new work in a 45 minute concert format across the two-day time period, providing a platform and an amplified voice to early career theatre makers.
2 comments:
I think it is always good to try to keep up to date with new works. In a climate of theatre that is oversaturated with film adaptations it is important to lift up original works. This list has a bunch of cool sounding shows. I think the ones i’m most interested in following up on are Baked! The Musical, Perpetual Sunshine & the Ghost Girls, Get Out Alive, and King of Pangaea. The summary of Baked! The Musical sounds unhinged. It’s title is quite deceiving as the musical is truly about the baking of drugs, not food, to pay for admission to Harvard. It’s synopsis already shows an edge and interest in critique into the cost of education in the US. It also feels like a show that is ready to serve the nuances and question the ethics of capitalism. Overall, a thought-provoking comedic show. I’m intrigued. Perpetual Sunshine & the Ghost Girls involves the history of the radium girls. Aka, I am ready for the anti-capitalism and pro-worker sentiments. Get Out Alive is described as afrogoth. It is a story that deals with harsh subjects but in a way that acknowledges there is recovery. King of Pangaea has folk rock. I like folk rock.
These all seem like interesting musicals. I appreciate the wide range and diversity represented by these shows. There’s diversity in who the musicals are by, in what the musicals are about, and in the type of music each show uses. I think I am most intrigued by Blackout and The Pelican. Blackout is giving me Hadestown vibes in that it is a marriage between Greek mythology and a relatively modern setting. I do not know if the aesthetic and music are similar at all to Hadestown at all. They may feel like two very different musicals, and the similarity is just on paper. Either way, I am a sucker for Greek mythology and so I would be down to watch this. The Pelican also seems interesting for seemingly to center on a single location. That reminds me of Sweat. I think some of the other plays are harder for me to imagine on stage, especially Pup, so the pelican in its seemingly more grounded storytelling seems like it would be a better play to watch than something about a dog or a female pope.
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