Beth Morrison Projects exploded onto the scene in 2005 and has quickly established itself as a producer of bold contemporary work both in New York City and internationally. Beth Morrison Projects was incorporated as a nonprofit organization in New York State in September 2005 and received its 501(c)(3) in 2006 and tax exemption in October 2007.

In its first two years of existence, Beth Morrison Projects fulfilled most of its initial goals for the first five years of operation.  The company’s recent production of Going Down Swingin’ (commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and New Sounds Theatre) at the 2007 New York Musical Theater Festival earned high praise from Variety and other critics and received funding from the Anna Sosenko Trust. 

The company’s production of Don Juan in Prague (conceived, adapted, and directed by David Chambers), supported by the Trust for Mutual Understanding, was an international co-production with the Czech National Theater in Prague.  Initially playing at the Estates National Theater in Prague, where Mozart’s Don Giovanni premiered, this unique adaptation of Don Giovanni then moved to New York where it closed the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2006 Next Wave Festival with a sold-out run. 

BMP’s 2006 production of Hell: The Opera, the first opera to be presented at Performance Space 122 (PS122), received support from the Puffin Foundation and Goldman Foundation and earned praise from a wide variety of audience members, ranging from seasoned fans of traditional opera to those for whom the piece was their first introduction to the form. 

Also in 2006, Beth Morrison Projects produced Laude in Urbis, a street spectacle piece, conceived and directed by Karin Coonrod, that took over and played on the streets of Orvieto, Italy. 

The company’s critically acclaimed world premiere of the mob opera Don Imbroglio, which played at the 2005 New York Musical Theater Festival, was extended to accommodate the broad interest, and BMP’s sold-out presentation of the innovative operatic song-cycle, The Elements of Style by Nico Muhly, was lauded by National Public Radio and New York Magazine as one of the “Best of 2005.”    All of these projects were created by living composers and given premieres by Beth Morrison Projects.

In addition to production work, Beth Morrison Projects has commissioned several works including Jonah by playwright, Marcus Gardley and gospel folk band, Ollabelle; Ghostsongs by playwright David Nugent and three New York songwriters including Lee Feldman, Carol Lipnik, and Chris Moore (both commissioned in conjunction with New Sounds Theatre); and finally, Beth Morrison Projects has commissioned Nico Muhly to write an original music-theatre work for the hot contemporary ensemble, Ethel.  

Beth Morrison Projects commissions, develops, and produces new, unique, and bold music-theatre works that take the form of opera, musical theater, chamber music, song-cycle, dance, theatre, film, mixed media work, and new forms waiting to be discovered.
 
Relying on the core values of collaboration, exploration, experimentation, artistry, and excellence, Beth Morrison Projects seeks to be a home for diverse voices from varied disciplines to discover new forms of story-telling that explore the human condition and the world we live in through music-drama. Beth Morrison Projects encourages risk-taking and serves as a supportive, nurturing environment where composers and other artists feel safe to strive for their uppermost level of artistic achievement without fear of failure.

Beth Morrison Projects is led by Creative Producer Beth Morrison, an opera and theatre producer, singer, and voice teacher with bachelor and master of music degrees and a master of fine arts in theatre management/producing from the Yale School of Drama, as well as many years of experience in the development of new opera and theatre works. She first cultivated her extensive experience in arts administration at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute where she served as administrative director for four years. Beth Morrison Projects is the realization of Beth’s vision, which stems from a deep commitment to nurturing artists and fostering the development of new opera and other new music-drama works.

Advisory Board Members

Linda Brumbach, Pomegranate Arts

James Bundy, Yale School of Drama/Yale Repertory Theatre

Jane Gullong, New York City Opera

Ruby Lerner, Creative Capital Foundation

Joseph Melillo, BAM

Board Members

Ralph Dandrea, LLP

Greggory Gordon, CPA

Peggy Sullivan, Ph.D., Management Consultant

David Chambers, Director

David Chambers is a stage director, author, producer, and teacher with a record of productions on Broadway and at other venues in New York and elsewhere in the United States and Europe. He has worked, among others, for the Arena Stage and The Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D. C., The New York Shakespeare Festival, The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, The Goodman Theater in Chicago, The Manhattan Theater Club, and The Yale Repertory Theater. On Broadway, he has to his credit stagings of plays by Christopher Durang and Howard Korder, plus a Drama Desk Award nomination for best stage direction. He is an associate artist at South Coast Repertory where his productions regularly receive various Los Angeles area awards. He is the author of texts for musicals and translations of plays by Molière and Ibsen. He was involved in the New York drama festivals and has conducted operas at Bard SummerScape, and Performance Space 122. He co-founded the Russian-American project focused on the legacy of the theatre director, Vsevolod Emilievich Meyerhold. He staged several scenes for the new film The Good Shepherd with Angelina Jolie and Matt Damon, directed by Robert De Niro, which opened in cinemas in December 2006. David Chambers teaches directing at The Yale University School of Drama.

Compagnia Colombari,
Karin Coonrod, Artistic Director

Compagnia de’ Colombari is an international, interdenominational, interracial, theater company concerned about a world increasingly resistant to grace. Our current production is La Strada per Emmaus in the 21st century. Updating a traditional combination of hijinks and solemnity, the sacred and profane, texts and music, Laude moves theater into the streets to explore man’s relationship to the divine and redefine how theater can be true to the present and the eternal.

David Little, composer

Composer/Librettist David T. Little is actively committed to music of dramatic intensity and direct expression. A two-time BMI Student Composer Award Winner Little’s composition Screamer! was chosen by Maestro David Zinman as the winner of the 2004 Jacob Druckman Award for Orchestral Composition from the Aspen Music Festival,  where Little was a Schumann Fellow during the summer of 2003.  He is a 2003 recipient of the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and served as the 2001 ASCAP Leonard Bernstein Fellow in Composition at the Tanglewood Music Center.  Little was awarded the 2004 Harvey Gaul Prize from the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, which resulted in the commissioning of his Soldier Songs, and was most recently awarded an ASCAP Morton Gould Award.  A composer of great diversity, Little’s music has been concurrently praised as “smoothly euphonious…with tonal yet original harmonies” (American Record Guide), and “clanking, almost industrial” (The Stage). Alex Ross of The New Yorker was “completely gripped” by Little’s Sunday Morning Trepanation, proclaiming: “every bad-ass new-music ensemble in the city will want to play him.”  Holding a Bachelor’s degree in Percussion Performance, Little holds a Master of Music degree in Composition from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a Master of Fine Arts degree from Princeton University, where he is currently a doctoral candidate.

New Sounds Theatre
Russell Kaplan, Artistic Director

New Sounds Theatre is a New York City-based theatre company that is dedicated to advancing and redefining the role of original music in contemporary theatre. Every NST production prominently features an original musical score by a contemporary songwriter or composer, which is performed exclusively by live musicians. Whether it's an experimental rock ballet, an edgy hip-hop opera, or a Shakespeare classic with cinematic underscoring, each new NST production sets out to break down the boundaries between music and theatre in the most innovative ways. And with all of our music played live, each production is performed with an immediacy that simply can't be attained with a prerecorded soundtrack.

In addition to our productions, New Sounds Theatre is committed to artist development, fostering new collaborations, and education outreach.  Our "NST Sandbox" series allows artists to workshop new music-theatre pieces in a supportive, low-pressure environment.  We also help musicians and theatre artists to meet and network with like-minded collaborators, creating unique partnerships  that result in truly innovative new work.  And through our developing education and youth outreach program, we'll be helping children of all ages to discover the joy and expressive power of music and theatre.

Yana Ross, Director

Yana Ross is an award-winning stage, film, and television director with over 200 episodes of television programming for CBS, HBO, CNN and E! Entertainment networks as well as theater productions including recent No Exit (2004) by Jean Paul Sartre, The Dragon (2005) by Eugene Shwarts, The Clean House (2005) by Sarah Ruhl, and Sleeping Beauty (2006) by Elfriede Jelinek.

In addition to starting her repertory theater >>PLAY FORWARD>> in New York, Ms. Ross continues collaboration with Theater magazine where she served as the co-editor of a special issue “Russian Theater of the 21st Century.” Her work has been published in Moscow Times, Theater Der Zeit, and Theater Heute. Ms. Ross received a Master of Fine Arts from the Yale School of Drama.

In Fall 2006, Ms. Ross directed A Kingdom by Lola Arias at Performance Space 122 in New York City, and in Spring 2007, directs Bambiland by Elfriede Jelinek at Oskaras Korsunovas Theater in Vilnius, Lithuania. Ms. Ross is the founding director of Play Forward Theatre.

Yuval Sharon, Director

Yuval Sharon’s directorial work has been described as “magical” (The Village Voice), “ingenious” (San Francisco Chronicle) and “having a keen eye to mythology in the modern world” (Theatermania, New York).  With experiments in the collision of music, text, movement, and visual imagery, Yuval searches for new ways to unleash the unexpected in the theatrical event.
 
Yuval’s eclectic tastes have led him to direct a variety of projects such as a chamber-scale production of Verdi’s Aida, a carnivalesque mash-up of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, entitled Celebrate Good Times (Macbeth), a three-hour adaptation of Wagner’s Die Mesitersinger von Nürnberg, a fusion of Odissi dance and pop songs based on the classic Indian text Gita Govinda, human beatbox Yuri Lane’s one-man show Soundtrack City for New York, a collaborative riff on the themes of Schoenberg’s expressionistic opera Erwartung, the West Coast premiere production of William Finn’s musical A New Brain, and the American premiere of Falk Richter’s underground phenomenon God is a DJ in a production Theatermania called on of the 10 best performances in New York in 2004.  He has worked with San Francisco opera, New York City Opera, Deutsche Oper Berlin, Komische Oper Berlin, Berkeley Opera, The Asia Society of new York, The Deitch Projects, the New York Hip Hop Theater Festival, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Shotgun Players, and Prospect Theater Company.  He is co-founder of the New York based group Theater Faction.

Elliott Sharp, composer

New York city composer/producer/sound artist Elliott Sharp leads the ensembles Orchestra Carbon, Tectonics, and Terraplane and has pioneered ways of applying fractal geometry, chaos theory, and biological metaphors to musical composition and interaction. His compositions have been performed by the Symphony of the Hessischer Rundfunk, The Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Rezonanz, Continuum, Meridian Arts Ensemble, Flux Quartet, Sirius Stirng Quartet, and Zeitkratzer.  His collaborators have included qawaali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan;  Meredith Monk; blues legend Hubert Sumlin; playwright Dael Orlandersmith; cello innovator Frances-Marie Uitti; sci-fi writers Pat Cadigan and Lucius Shepard; jazz greats Sonny Sharrock, Jack deJohnette, and Oliver Lake; and Bachir Attar, leader of the Master Musicians of Jahjoukah.

Sharp's orchestra piece Calling was commissioned by the Hessischer Rundfunk to open the 2002 Darmstadt Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, and the CD won the January 2004 German Critics' Prize.  His composition Quarks Swim Free was premiered at the Venice Biennale in September 2003, and his chamber opera EmPyre was premiered at the 2006 Biennale. Sharp's most recent CD releases include Quadrature, a collection of solo acoustic guitar compositions; Calling with the Radio-Symphony of Frankfurt; Terraplane's Secret Life; and the string quartet Dispersion Of Seeds.

He founded the ongoing zOaR Records in 1978 both for his own productions, including the critically-acclaimed compilations Peripheral Vision and State Of The Union, and for other radical music.  He has recently completed the scores to the feature-films What Sebastian Dreamt, Commune by Jonathan Berman, and Spectropia by Toni Dove.  Installations include: Suspension, a video and audio work in collaboration with video artist Janene Higgins at the Chelsea Art Museum, NYC, 2003; Fluvial, computerized multi-channel audio-work commissioned by Engine 27 gallery, NYC June 2002;  and Chromatine, an interactive string sculpture/audiowork created for the Gallery of the School of Museum Of Fine Art, Boston, 2001.

Richard Teitelbaum, Composer

Composer/performer Richard Teitelbaum is well known for his pioneering work in live electronic music, and his early explorations of intercultural improvisation and composition. He has performed his works at Berlin's Philharmonic Hall, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Almeida Theater and South Bank in London, the Pompidou Center in Paris, the Kennedy Center in Washington, Merkin Hall in New York City and in concerts and festivals around the world. He has been commissioned by leading performers, including pianists Aki Takahashi and Ursula Oppens and collaborated with composers John Cage and Philip Glass, among others. Teitelbaum has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim, two Fulbright Scholarships and other esteemed grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Asian Cultural Council. In August 2007, Mr. Teitelbaum will perform in with his Musica Elettronica Viva at Tanglewood Music Center as part of the Festival of Contemporary Music.  2008 brings two prestigious commissions, including a new work for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and an interactive instrumental and computer piece for the Da Capo Chamber Players and the Fromm Music. Mr. Teitelbaum is a Professor of Music at Bard College, where he teaches electronic and experimental music, and co-chairs the music department of the Master of Fine Arts program.

Monday, January 12, 6:30 p.m.

The Player's Theatre
115 MacDougal Street
Greenwich Village

Don't miss this incredible work! Fresh off a standing-room-only run at Le Poisson Rouge in September, Soldier Songs performs again as part of the Music on MacDougal Series in a concert performance with animated video design by Corey Michael Smithson.

Composed by David T. Little
Conducted by Todd Reynolds
Played by Newspeak
Sung by Christopher Burchett

Click poster for larger image.

Tickets only $10.

For tickets, call (212) 352-3101
or click here .

Click here to view interview footage with the composer.

Click here to view a trailer.

Set Sketches

Song Samples

Two Marines

Hollywood Ending

Steel Rain

Still Life with Tank and iPod

Nobel Prize-winning author Elfriede Jelinek reinvents this classic story with the help of acclaimed experimental Russian director Yana Ross in a dark and humorous production destined for an international tour of the festival circuit. In Jelinek’s version of this timeless fairytale, an apocalyptic battle of the sexes ensues. Locked up in an orthopedic corset and strapped to metal and glass for a hundred years, the Princess is as fragile as a Ndebele doll. Soon after the Prince rips off her surgical armor, she learns to walk again, and the two become embroiled in a bitter and macabre struggle for power in a work that deftly explores our illusions—of sexuality, of power, and of being itself. Sleeping Beauty enjoyed a workshop premiere through the Yale Cabaret and Beth Morrison Projects takes it on the road to the Seoul Performing Arts Festival (Korea) in Fall 2008.

Press

Yale Herald

Yale Daily News

Soldier Songs is a multimedia event which captures the grim and conflicted experience at the heart of soldiers' lives. This moving theatrical cantata by award-winning composer David T. Little traces the shift in one man's personal perception of war, from the age of six to the age of sixty-six. Through a haunting amplified chamber score, arresting documentary film projections, and a libretto drawn from interviews with veterans of five different wars, *Soldier Songs* asks the tough questions and tells tough stories, creating a chilling yet realistic and subtle view of our media-crazed, war machine culture. Directed by Yuval Sharon and presented in Fall 2008 at New York's hippest new venue, Le Poisson Rouge (formerly the iconic Village Gate) in the heart of the West Village.

Soldier Song reviews

Music by Peter Hilliard
Book and Lyrics by Matt Boresi

Directed by Jenny Lord

Going Down Swingin' with music by Peter Hilliard and book and lyrics by Matt Boresi played at the New York Musical Theater Festival 2007 at the TBG Theater to rave reviews.  VARIETY said Going Down Swingin’ is “one of the fest’s most inventive musicals [and] also one of its most successful.”  BACKSTAGE said, "The savvy new musical Going Down Swingin' (The Don Giovanni Radio Hour)...a thoroughly scrumptious affair.... and, the entire cast sizzles."

A boozing, womanizing crooner is haunted by the misdeeds of his past in this sexy and swingin' comedy, set at the end of the Radio's Golden Age. It's 1956, and Dean Newhouse is the caddish host of a radio variety show that's facing a dangerous new foe...Television. Dean has double-crossed everyone on his show, including the tragic soap queen, the All-American teen couple, the hard-boiled detective, his wisecracking sidekick, and others! As Dean struggles to keep his show afloat - and his cast from killing him - we're treated to an original score that draws from genre music of the 40's and 50's to reinvent the story of a controversial classic - Don Giovanni - to startling comic and dramatic effect. The production was directed by Jenny Lord and starred Stacie Bono, Tom Deckman, Colin Hanlon, George McDaniel, Meredith Patterson, Hardy Rawls, Christopher Shyer, and James Stovall (all appear courtesy of Actors Equity Association).  Production designs by Maiko Chii, Zane Pihlstrom, Kate Cussack, Burke Brown, and  Amy Altadonna.  Going Down Swingin’ was an official selection of the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival.  BMP is currently seeking venues for the next developmental production.

Going Down Swingin’ was an official selection
of the 2007 New York Musical Theatre Festival.

www.goingdownswingin.com

Press for Going Down Swingin'

Variety

Backstage

NYTheatre.com

EdgeNY

Blog by Sarah B

Broadway Bullet Blog 1

Broadway Bullet Blog 2

Hope. Peace. Co-existence. Richard Teitelbaum offers the possibility of all three in his new opera Z'vi , which weaves together the musical traditions and theologies of the Jewish and Muslim worlds. Shabbetai Zevi, a self-proclaimed Jewish Messiah in 1665, finds himself imprisoned in Turkey and faced with the choice of converting to Islam or facing death. He goes through with the conversion, and grows to discover the common spiritual ground of these disparate religions. Z'vi juxtaposes exhilarating Judaic and Sufi musical traditions in its quest to find commonality... humanity... utopia.

New York Times review

LA Times Review

This new musical with book by award-winning playwright Marcus Gardley and music by roots-rockers Olabelle is set in Israel, Louisiana (population 613) in 1942. Jonah Bell, small-town prophet and struggling fisherman, lives a humble life amongst God-fearing townspeople who spend their days lusting for vengeance against the corrupt city of Ninevah. When Jonah gets the sign they’ve all been waiting for, they send him to seek their revenge… but does God really want justice, or something else that only Jonah can see? This innovative spin on the Bible’s most moving and timeless story promises to stir hearts and minds.

David Nugent sets words to original music performed by piano-pop savant Lee Feldman, soulful carnival-barker Carol Lipnik, and indie rock luminary Chris Moore as they share their favorite ghost stories in a musical show-and-tell that takes audiences through the darkest corners of New York’s past, present, and future. From the shadows of haunted after-hours jazz clubs to sinister Coney Island freakshows, audiences will thrill to tales of mystery, horror, and humor from these unique voices from New York’s pop underground.

In an evening of music and theatre entitled ECLIPSE, Beth Morrison Projects produces director Yuval Sharon’s take on Schoenberg’s peerless song cycle Pierrot Lunaire alongside Mahler’s unclassifiable masterpiece Das Lied von der Erde. Written within three years of each other, each work incorporates many genres, presenting multiple narratives and defying simple categorization. Both Schoenberg’s and Mahler’s works explore themes of nature and modernity through unique formal innovations that yield themselves to inventive, highly detailed staging. A variety of fascinating dialogues will be inspired by the side-by-side presentation of the two works, and the theatrical possibilities and emotional life of the pieces are certain to resonate with audience members from all walks of life.

A contemporary adaptation of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, stunningly conceived by director David Chambers and featuring acclaimed Czech performance artist Iva Bittova, the production remains true to Mozart’s music and to the superb libretto by da Ponte but is told through the lens of the character Donna Elvira (Bittova), condemning the hapless Don for his unrepentant philandering. The music becomes at once contemporary through the arrangements and digital processing by Matthew Suttor along with video media design by Peter Flaherty. DON JUAN IN PRAGUE played at The National Theatre of the Czech Republic (where Don Giovanni premiered in 1787) as part of the city-wide celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday in October 2006. Following the Prague run, the production came to New York where it closed the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s 2006 Next Wave Festival in December.

Press for Don Juan in Prague

Prague Post

A re-imagining of the medieval mystery plays, Compagnia Colombari’s THE ROAD TO EMMAUS—conceived by director Karin Coonrod—is a site-specific work with spoken and sung text and original compositions that played the streets of Orvieto, Italy in June 2006 to crowds of 600. Addressing and crossing cultural, racial, ethnic, language, and religious boundaries, this unique work unites communities. The audience traveled through the streets of Orvieto with the Company as the players played the play on the steps of the celebrated Duomo, in the medieval churches, through the narrow winding streets, and finally into the Piazza San Giovenale, where every evening the play ended with a banquet for the audience and performers alike. A revival of this street spectacle is planned for 2008.

Beth Morrison Projects gave this new opera by Peter Hilliard and Matt Boresi its world premiere in September 2005 at the New York Musical Theater Festival. After selling out the entire initial run, the show was extended to accommodate the vast public interest. A show with broad appeal and an accessible theme catering to both opera and musical theatre aficionados, DON IMBROGLIO seamlessly blends these two time-honored disciplines in a surprising combustion of creativity and originality that serves both to shed light on and to send up the popular Italian mafia fiction genre.

Talkin’ Broadway wrote of the production: “A show daring to subtitle itself, ‘An Opera You Can’t Refuse,’ has three vital responsibilities to fulfill: it had better be an opera, it had better be irreverent, and it had better be darn good. Don Imbroglio[…] meets all three criteria and then some.”

Press for Don Imbroglio

Playbill.com

Variety

Talkin' Broadway

Conceived by Maira Kalman and composed by Nico Muhly, this new song-cycle set to the indispensable writing manual, Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style, incorporates singers with instruments ranging from viola, banjo, and vibraphone to tea cups, typewriter, and duck call.

Kalman—an illustrator of children’s books, designer of fabrics and covers for The New Yorker, and the sole artist entrusted by the estate of E.B. White with the illustration of his timeless text—commissioned the emerging composer Nico Muhly to create operatic songs using lyrics from The Elements of Style.

Beth Morrison Projects produced this work which was presented in a sold-out performance as part of the LIVE from the New York Public Library series in October 2005, igniting a media frenzy of coverage in The New York Times, A&E, NPR, and CBS Morning News. THE ELEMENTS OF STYLE was selected by National Public Radio as one of its “Best of 2005.”

Press for The Elements of Style

Newsweek

New York Magazine

New York Times

STL Today

TimeOut New York

A new operatic theatre piece by composer Michael Webster and poet Eileen Myles, HELL premiered at Performance Space 122 in March 2006. Grounded in contemporary politics, this multimedia work takes Dante’s Inferno as a point of departure to explore free speech and the role of poetry in post-9/11 America. By returning poetry to a place of central importance in performance, HELL reminds audiences of the necessity of this unique art form in a democracy. At times beautiful, funny, and horrifying, this rich work reflects on war as a tragic alternative to communication in a highly relevant and timely avant-garde opera.

Press for Hell: the Opera

James Wagner dot com

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