Sarah Taylor Ellis

Selections from These Girls Have Demons, a new rock musical by bookwriter/lyricist Meghan Brown and composer Sarah Taylor Ellis, were presented on December 18, 2023, as part of the Deutsche Musical Akademie's schreib:maschine at Berlin's Neuköllner Oper. Watch the video here!

Selections from These Girls Have Demons, a new rock musical, will be presented in Berlin on December 18 as part of the Deutsche Musical Akademie's schreib:maschine. This contemporary show explores the repressed emotions of four teenage girls in a patriarchal society.

Winter is here and what better time of year to stay in and snuggle up with a great book? You're in luck, because this year, Broadway's best have put pen to paper to turn out theatre page-turners of every kind. From theatre biographies to theatre fiction; theatre books for kids to theatre history; check out our collection of 25 new Broadway books for every theatre lover's winter reading list.

Galvanized by the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May of 2020, Cerise Jacobs and her activist opera company, White Snake Projects, developed the virtual opera Death by Life – exploring  the intersection of systemic racism and mass incarceration with texts written by incarcerated writers and their families and a score by five Black composers – to stand as a monument of support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Pittsburgh CLO has announced the launch of an innovative theatrical collaboration project, Songs for a New Year. As a part of its New Works initiative, Pittsburgh CLO reached out to five writing teams to invite them to respond to the turning of the New Year in a commissioned song.

Hamlet's dad is dead. His uncle has taken over the kingdom and married Hamlet's mum. The whole world feels like it's turned upside down.

Rivendell Theatre Ensemble (RTE), Chicago's only Equity theatre dedicated to producing new work with women at the core, presents the world premiere of The Tasters by Meghan Brown, directed by RTE member Devon de Mayo. The Tasters runs January 10 a?" February 16, 2020 at Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, 5779 N. Ridge Avenue in Chicago.  The press opening is Monday, January 20 at 7:00pm

The cast is set for an industry reading of The Trojan Women, which will be presented on 9 August 2019, at Dragon Hall in Covent Garden.

Victory Gardens Theater Artistic Director Chay Yew, Executive Director Erica Daniels and Director of New Play Development Skyler Gray announce the lineup for the 11th Anniversary IGNITION Festival of New Plays, including The Tasters by Meghan Brown; The Gradient by Steph Del Rosso; [hieroglyph] by Erika Dickerson-Despenza; #NEWSLAVES by Keelay Gipson; Reckoning: Furies from a New Queer Nation by Geraldine Inoa; and They Could Give No Name by Exal Iraheta. The 2019 Festival runs August 2 -4, 2019 at Victory Gardens Theater, located at 2433 N Lincoln Avenue.

Pittsburgh CLO will launch its second New Musicals Weekend, a project of the Next Generation Campaign's New Small Musicals Initiative. New Musicals Weekend, the mini version of the SPARK festival, takes the core goals of SPARK and puts them into action over just seven days. New Musicals Weekend aims to develop new musicals for the CLO Cabaret by supporting writing teams with financial and creative resources and by building relationships with local and national artists. 

OPERA America, the national service organization for opera and the nation's leading champion for American opera, is pleased to announce the 2019 recipients of Discovery Grants from the Opera Grants for Female Composers program, which is made possible through the generosity of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.

Pittsburgh CLO will launch its second New Musicals Weekend, a project of the Next Generation Campaign's New Small Musicals Initiative. New Musicals Weekend, the mini version of the SPARK festival, takes the core goals of SPARK and puts them into action over just a few days. Similar to SPARK, New Musicals Weekend aims to develop new musicals for the CLO Cabaret by supporting writing teams with financial and creative resources and by building relationships with local and national artists. 

This summer, JAW: A Playwrights Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary by doing what it does best: selecting some of the most exciting new plays of our time and providing complete support to the playwrights to develop those scripts in whatever area is most beneficial to them. Two weeks of script workshopping will culminate in the JAW Big Weekend, July 27-29, where public staged readings of the scripts will be presented along with performances from local artists and classes. Plenty of champagne and birthday cake will also be enjoyed, to celebrate all that JAW has accomplished since its brave and ambitious beginnings in 1999.

Admission to individual SPARK events April 6-8 is now available online at pittsburghCLO.org/SPARK. For a small donation to Pittsburgh CLO's Audience Development and Education programs, members of the public are invited to peek behind the scenes of a musical in the making as 10 writing teams from across the country converge in Pittsburgh to showcase their work through a series of public presentations featuring local and national actors. Performances will take place at venues throughout the Cultural District.

PITTSBURGH CLO is pleased to welcome a collection of writing teams from across the country to Pittsburgh for the inaugural SPARK festival in March. These teams were chosen from a highly-selective submissions process and will have the opportunity to rehearse and revise their work in residencies ranging from two days to three weeks. SPARK will provide dramaturgy and production resources to 10 new musicals at all stages of development, in addition to the world premiere of UP AND AWAY. As a part of the development period, eight of the musicals will receive public presentations through which the writing teams can gather audience insights and focus their intentions for the next phase of development. A major initiative of Pittsburgh CLO's recently completed Next Generation Capital Campaign, SPARK is designed to cultivate new and innovative work from emerging and established musical theater artists. 

The New York Society Library presents a new chamber musical based on Euripides' The Trojan Women on Monday, January 22, at 6pm. With libretto by Ellen McLaughlin and music by Sarah Taylor Ellis, The Trojan Women will be directed by Rachel Dickstein and music directed by Mila Henry.

Producer Ben Toth has announced casting for an upcoming invitation-only reading of Emma, a new musical inspired by Jane Austen's classic novel, on Monday, September 25 and Tuesday, September 26 at the Dodger Atelier.

THE YELLOW WALLPAPER: The Writing, and Composing, on the Wall "This needs to be a musical." With those words to composer Sarah Taylor Ellis, writer/actor/director Lane Williamson handed over a copy of Charlotte Perkins Gilmore's 6,000 word seminal 1892 short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, often considered to be one of the very first feminist works. As she began to read, Sarah knew exactly what Lane meant. Collaborators since meeting during graduate school at UCLA, Sarah and Lane have found that they share a deep connection and creative sensibility, so Sarah knew immediately that Lane was talking about how the "character" of the wallpaper itself, as it reflected the main character's desperate search for self, could be expressed in shifting musical patterns, textures and styles, mirroring the psychological experience of the room's inhabitant.

54 BELOW, Broadway's Supper Club, presents Intersections: The Music of Ellis and Williamson on December 12, 2013 at 11:30pm. At the intersection of classic musical theater and contemporary classical music, Sarah Taylor Ellis and Lane Williamson's vernacular art songs cut to the core. Their smart and contemplative music encompasses settings of prose, sonnets, and tumblr posts, and their new chamber musical The Yellow Wallpaper adapts Charlotte Perkins Gilman's early feminist short story into a haunting theatrical work. Join Ellis and Williamson for the 54 Below debut of a distinctive new songwriting team.

The 2006 NYMF Awards for Excellence were presented on Sunday, November 12th at the Hudson Theatre, and BroadwayWorld was there!