UP NEXT: Spotlight Series: New Works in Focus
Our Spotlight Series is back! Join us during Philly Theatre Week for three 30-minute excerpts of new musicals by local creatives. See more information about each of the three pieces and their writers below!
Showings at the Horan Studio Theatre at the Arden on Sunday, 4/26 at 2pm & 7pm, and on Monday 4/27 at 7pm.
In this year's Spotlight Series, all three remarkable works-in-progress from our own community use historically documented individuals as their source material and transform them, through imagination and theatrical invention, into something that reaches beyond biography toward deeper truths about identity and what it costs to be fully oneself.
Eleanor & Hick
Music and lyrics by Tom Wilson Weinberg; book by Tom Wilson Weinberg and John Whyte
Eleanor & Hick tells the true story of one of history’s most unlikely and enduring love affairs: the relationship between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok, the tenacious AP journalist assigned to cover her during FDR’s first presidential campaign. Beginning with their charged and wary first meeting in the governor’s mansion and spanning more than three decades — through the White House years, Hick’s painful sacrifice of her career and independence, and a final, hard-won accommodation between two women who loved each other without a roadmap for how — the show combines wit, political sweep, and a remarkably sophisticated emotional intelligence. This is not hagiography and not camp: it takes its characters seriously as people navigating the competing demands of love, ambition, and public life, and it does so with songs of genuine theatrical accomplishment.
New York Letters
Book by Mare Rozzelle; music and lyrics by Arden Kass and Glenn Prangnell
New York Letters reimagines John Lennon’s years in New York City through an audacious theatrical lens: Julia Lennon, John’s mother — long dead, hovering beyond the margins of scenes she never witnessed — serves as the show’s narrator and emotional conscience. The result is a rock musical that moves with ease between the intimate and the historical: the tender, unfinished business between John and his son Julian; the sharp-elbowed political absurdity of Nixon-era surveillance; the warmth of friendships with Harry Nilsson and Ringo; the ghost of Aunt Mimi arriving with opinions intact. At its core, New York Letters is a story about what we inherit, what we abandon, and whether it’s ever too late to repair what’s broken — told with the kind of musical energy that fills a room.
The Magically Re-Imagined History of J.K. Rowling
Book, music, and lyrics by Jaime Jarrett
Set in Brooklyn in the summer of 2020, The Magically Re-Imagined History of J.K. Rowling follows Oliver, a transgender man who has always planned to share the Harry Potter series with his daughter Georgie — the books that once gave him language and hope for his own identity. When Rowling publishes her now-infamous essay on sex and gender, Oliver faces a crisis that is both cultural and deeply personal: the stories that shaped him have been claimed by a worldview that denies his existence. Rather than simply rejecting Rowling or her work, Oliver embarks on a journey through her past, guided by J.K. — an omniscient, fantastical version of Rowling who lives inside his imagination — in an effort not to judge her but to change her. Drawing on verbatim text from Rowling’s own interviews and writings alongside an original pop-rock score, Jaime Jarrett has constructed something theatrically daring and emotionally precise: a show that uses a real and painful cultural rupture as the engine for a story about agency, imagination, and what we do when something we love becomes complicated.
Want to learn more about our past productions?
Visit our Production Archives page, and see past programming in action on our YouTube page!
Support for MusiCoLab provided by the Philadelphia Cultural Fund
This website uses cookies.
We use cookies to analyze website traffic and optimize your website experience. By accepting our use of cookies, your data will be aggregated with all other user data.