POLYPHONE

In 2014 Joanna Settle and I came up with a plan to replace the annual spring musical at the The University of the Arts in Philadelphia with a festival of new musicals: Polyphone. During my five seasons as Artistic Director, 19 new musicals made their way through the annual Polyphone Festival, and hundreds of artists participated in this grand experiment around centering process and creative risk. With Polyphone we pointed University resources towards emerging artists, we sought to educate our students by getting them in the rooms where musicals are born, and we nurtured a musical theater underground by programming musicals that are unusual, experimental, provocative and often created by voices that have been systematically excluded from the musical theater mainstream.

I served as Artistic Director for five seasons 2014-2019. The brilliant playwright/lyricist Maggie Kate Coleman was named the new Artistic Director in the Fall of 2019. Polyphone continues on at UArts and accepts submissions for new musicals each year. Visit Polyphone.org for the latest.