Submit Your Musical for Polyphone 2019:
Click here for SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Polyphone 2019 will run February 26-March 2, 2019 at the Arts Bank Theater and the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia. Details and show line-up will be announced this Fall.
2018 Polyphone Festival
March 27-March 31, 2018
Arts Bank Theater & Caplan Studio Theater
University of the Arts, Philadelphia
César Alvarez, Artistic Director
2018 Festival Line-Up:
Ancient Future (Caplan Studio Theater) March 27 at 8pm | March 29 at 8pm | March 31 5pm
Retrograde (Caplan Studio Theater) March 28 8pm | March 30 8pm | March 31 11am
White Girl in Danger (Arts Bank Theater) March 27 8pm | March 29 8pm | March 31 8pm
Cowboy Bob (Arts Bank Theater) March 28 8pm | March 30 8pm | March 31 2pm
Additional information for the 2018 festival will be available January 2018. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode of “Working in the Theatre” by American Theatre Wing, featuring the 2017 Polyphone Festival!
Polyphone is a festival of the new and emerging musical at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. For the last three years we’ve brought composers, librettists, directors, choreographers and music directors from the field onto the campus of the University of the Arts to work with student casts and creatives on never before produced musicals. All four works rehearse and go through rewrites for six weeks in February and March, tech for three days, and put up three off-book staged concert performances each. The shows all have a full band, and lights with minimal sets and costumes. The process allows the authors to make changes over the whole rehearsal period, all while demanding flexibility and willingness to venture into the unknown of the students. On the last day of the festival we line up all four shows and perform them in a marathon. The result is a sharing of process on an epic scale. Watching eight hours of newly born musicals is a totally overwhelming experience, but it puts us into a sublime state of openness and reflection about our craft and our purpose.
-César Alvarez, Artistic Director
Ancient Future (Caplan Studio Theater) March 27 at 8pm | March 29 at 8pm | March 31 5pm
Ancient Future is a musical written by Storm Thomas about art and activism over time. It follows a group who must quest around the house to remember the plot they recently forgot. Ancient Future is a kaleidoscopic conjuring of remembrance and uses music to awaken memories of place and one another. The musical is a moving expression of the radical participatory communitarian and puppet-filled aesthetic of the Brooklyn-based theater collective To Rena, Love Us.
Author: Storm Thomas | Director/Choreographer: Marisa Clementi | Dramaturg/Co-Creator: Elizabeth Barnett Production Manager and Designer-at-large: Julianna Rusakiewicz | Music Director: Dante Green
Retrograde (Caplan Studio Theater) March 28 8pm | March 30 8pm | March 31 11am
Retrograde (Adj.)
– 1. Moving, occurring, or performed in a backward direction
– 2. Tending toward or resulting in a worse of previous state
– 3. Affecting memories of a period prior to brain trauma
Retrograde is a new musical about a young person who is forced to question identity and what it means in the world around them, when a brain injury threatens to take away all the things they’ve know to be true for the past 21 years. Sarah Flaim’s raw, haunting, compositions paint pictures in harmony with Sav Souza’s words to tell the story of Z, as they search for an answer to the eternal question we all face:
Who am I?
Director/Choreographer Amy Smith
Book and Lyrics by Sav Souza ‘18| Music by Sarah Flaim ‘18 | Orchestrations by Jacob Jarret ‘17 & Dante Green ‘19
White Girl in Danger (Arts Bank Theater) March 27 8pm | March 29 8pm | March 31 8pm
White Girl in Danger is a dark musical comedy about Keesha, an ordinary black girl who seeks to prove that she’s just as much of a protagonist as every Lifetime Original Movie heroine white girl in her town as issues such as drugs, alcohol, abusive boyfriends, eating disorders, and finally a serial killer starts picking the white girls off one by one. Inspired by classic 90s TV movies such as “She Cried No,” “She Fought Alone, and “Mother May I Sleep With Danger?”
Author: Michael R. Jackson | Director: Malika Oyetimein | Music Director: Adam Wiggins | Choreographer: Kilo Martin
Cowboy Bob (Arts Bank Theater) March 28 8pm | March 30 8pm | March 31 2pm
Peggy Jo Tallas is Cowboy Bob: the scourge of Texas strip mall banks, a tragic insurgent against the patriarchy, a bombshell outlaw exacting revenge on her banker ex-boyfriend. Zigzagging between the urban sprawl of Dallas in the 1990s and self-help addled Hollywood of today, COWBOY BOB is a musical portraiture pile-on of a woman we may never really know.
Playwright: MOLLY BEACH MURPHY|Music & Lyrics: JEANNA PHILLIPS| Developed and Directed by ANNIE TIPPE |Music Direction & Arrangements: ALEX THRAIKILL
Tickets for 2018 Polyphone Festival will go on sale March 5 2018 at tickets.uarts.edu
Ticket prices range from free for the UArts Community, to $15 for the General Public. (The cost for Marathon Day Passes is TBD.)
For inquiries please contact Jen Jaynes: jjaynes@uarts.edu