A DC-BASED COMPANY, and at our core:
DEVELOPING AND PRODUCING ORIGINAL WORKS OF MUSIC-THEATRE,
FOSTERING THE GROWTH OF ARTISTS,
AND ENGAGING WITH THE COMMUNITY IN PARTNERSHIP
Changing the Conversation Through the Arts
In Flanders Fields
This Veterans Day, Tuesday, November 11, (previously Armistice Day,) join us in a music-theatre program in remembrance of ancestors and others lost to commemorate what was known as “the war to end all wars.”
Alliance member artists John Boulanger, Alan Naylor, and Cara Schaefer will transport audience members back over a hundred years, bringing to life a very different era of the nation’s history through the lens of one American family caught up in the war. Portraying noted essayist, biographer, and playwright John Jay Chapman, his wife, Elizabeth Astor Chapman, and son Victor, they reminisce about Victor’s service in the French Foreign Legion and as a WWI aviator.
The program features Victor’s letters home, interspersed with poetry and songs written during the “Great War.” Selections include the iconic “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae, and poems by other noted war poets including Wilfred Owen, Alan Seeger, and Siegfried Sassoon.
You will also hear American popular songs by George M. Cohan and others, settings of John McCrae’s famous title poem by Charles Ives and John Phillip Sousa, and a group of settings of A.E. Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad” poems by British composer George Butterworth, a British composer who died in the war.
Victor joined the Foreign Legion in September 1914. After a year in the trenches, he joined the “Lafayette Escadrille,” the Legion’s American Aviation Corps, and was the first American aviator to perish in the conflict, all before the United States entered the war in 1917.
John Boulanger has curated the program after many years of research into the Chapmans legacy and led a showcase workshop of the work in 2017, which we presented at the Woodrow Wilson House to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the United States’ entry into the conflict.
John and Cara have been featured in several original productions of New Music-Theatre. Helen Hayes award-winner Alan Naylor will serve as pianist in addition to portraying Victor Chapman.
The evening is a joint presentation with the Arts Club of Washington, and will take place in the historic Monroe House, which served as the Presidential residence after the White House was damaged during the War of 1812.
The Arts Club will provide a small bites buffet and beverages, included in the price of the ticket. The salon program starts at 7:00 pm.
Period Dress encouraged.
Tickets available HERE.
---------------------------------------------------------------
The George Fulginiti Series: Cabaret, Cocktails, & Conversation
Thanks to all who came to our first Cabaret for this season to enjoy Josh Cleveland in his curated Cabaret - "One True Sentence'"- on October 7 at the Arts Club of Washington. With his collaborator Alyssa Payne, the performance embodied the spirit of our Cabaret Series to the letter, innovatively and energetically expanding the definition of classic blues and jazz, bringing modern sensibility and context to golden-age favorites, and speaking to today’s DC experience with incisive musical storytelling.
Here is an excerpt from his performance - his song "Constitution Blues." Enjoy!
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We continue our second season at the Arts Club of Washington
on Tuesday, December 2
with Awa Sal Secka
in her original program "Bi-Coastal Acoustic"
Awa Sal Secka (Actor/Writer) is a first generation Gambian-American multi-award winning artist working all over the country. Awa has a large DMV following who was recently featured in PLAY ON! and won the Helen Hayes award for Outstanding Supporting Performer in a Musical in the role of Sarah in Ragtime, both at Signature Theatre.
A New York native, she moved to the DMV in 2005 and has lived here since. Awa has forged a place for herself in the theatrical world and is intent upon re-imagining what kind of art people of color can be a part of, and adding to the canon of stories that people of color were always meant to tell.
Awa is our Featured Artist this month. Read down to the end of the newsletter.
These are the other artists in our season:
February 3 -- Javier Arrey -- “Music without Borders"
April 7 – Oren Levine & Aaron Myers “A Jazzy Something”
June 2 -- Alan Naylor -- “Songs We Need Now”
Hope you will join us for these special events.
What can you expect coming to our cabaret evenings? Sometimes familiar tunes, to be sure, but we specialize in original cabaret compositions, sometimes crossover genres, and we encourage artists to bend and push boundaries of the cabaret form and always speak to our current times, in the space and the place where we are. We come together for an intimate experience with artists who have something to say and engage in lively conversation with the artists following every performance.
The Arts Club of Washington venue is intimate, perfect for an optimal cabaret experience. Also thrown into the price of a ticket, the Arts Club will provide a small bites buffet and a signature cocktail created for this performance. Following the show you will meet the artist and enjoy other fine company. For each performance, the bar opens at 6:30 pm, the show starts at 7:00 pm.
Hope you will join us for these special events. We are also offering the Cabaret Series on a subscription basis for all five performances for $275
Tickets for individual performances are $65. For tickets, go HERE.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Tribute to Greg Williams
1949-2025
I first met Greg when we were both in the Darden Business School MBA program at UVA in 1980-82. We became lifelong friends. After a long and successful career in finance, managing several banking institutions in the Washington area, Greg retired and turned his efforts to supporting the DMV theatre community.
He was an avid theater goer with multiple subscriptions, who followed the development of productions from readings and workshops to full productions and especially championed new works. He always showed up, enjoyed the shows and passed his enthusiasm onto others!
Due to his extensive knowledge of local DMV theatre companies and their seasons, Greg also co-curated with me our Live & About Series, selecting shows throughout the season which he believed were of high-level artistry and also introduced participants to new theaters and artistic expressions.
Greg was an active member of the Board of Alliance for New Music-Theatre for many years and served as Treasurer since 2020. We benefitted greatly from his time, his financial acumen, and his generous contributions.
In 2024 Greg was the first recipient of the re-established Gary Maker Audience Award, which was originally created by Lorraine Treanor and DC Theatre Scene, in 2011. “It recognizes those who are passionate, involved, informed and grounded in their love for theater and lend their time and personal support to encourage audiences and see that theater in the Washington area not only survives, but thrives.”
This annual award will go forward, providing an opportunity to bring the theater community together and to celebrate our wonderful Greater Washington audiences who help make our community a vibrant center for theater. In Greg's honor we are renaming the annual award to the Gary Maker & Greg Williams Audience Award.
We will miss you, Greg, but believe you will be present amongst us, in the best seat in the house!
Duane Gelderloos
---------------------------------------------------------------
2026 Composer-Librettist Studio
We are now planning the fourth annual Washington DC Composer-Librettist Studio for June 2026. The sessions will be conducted from June 13 - 28 and hosted by the Music Department of the University of the District of Columbia.
If you are interested in applying for our 2026 CL Studio (or you know someone who might be interested,)
please fill out this brief INTEREST FORM HERE.
The full On-line application forms for professional Composers, Librettists, and Singers-Actors will be available December 1, 2025.
More information on our webpage HERE.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Featured Artist Ruslan Bondar
Ruslan Bondar is a Ukrainian conductor of secular and sacred choral music and has landed recently in the DMV with his young family, who has become a friend and member of our company.
I asked Ruslan to talk about our upcoming production of The Trumpeter and what it means to him to tell this story about the war in his homeland.
When I first read the play, I was surprised that there were so many details in it that matched what is happening right now in eastern Ukraine. The character of the Trumpeter wants to make music but that life has been destroyed by the war, and how the play moves between what is really happening all around him—the rockets and the bombs— and his memories. It is very important for me to tell this story in Washington DC about a man who once lived a normal life but now no more. I’ve been in the city of Mariupol and met friends there. I too am a man and a musician who never thought this would happen to my country, and for the horrible choice I had make to leave behind family members, including my mother, my brother, and two daughters from my first marriage. For me I would have stayed, but for my young son, I felt I owed it to him to build for him a new, safe life.
It is indeed a tragic situation. Are you able to be in touch with loved ones in Kyiv?
Every week, once or twice a week, we Facetime. I send money, clothes, what I can. But it is not enough, and what Russia has destroyed, it will take years, even decades to repair.
Speak about the music that you will be integrating in the production, which will be so powerful in the Dupont Underground space.
I think about putting together some folk music, to show what we Ukrainians have created in over 1000 years of history with rich musical traditions, both secular and spiritual. I also want to share some nice music created in the last few years by composers continuing to write in the midst of these tragic circumstances.
Do you know we will include the Ukrainian National anthem played on a trumpet?
And we also have a spiritual anthem which every Ukrainian knows. It will be beautiful, a capella in Dupont Underground.
(Listen to “Prayer for Ukraine” by composer Mykola Lysenko arr. Oleksandr Koshyts HERE.)
When we first met, Ruslan, I invited you into our Composer Librettist Studio this past summer, I told you that I was interested in you as a singer-conductor but especially because you have urgent important stories to share and I want us to work together to bring these stories to the stage. We already are starting to develop a new “Anthology Work on Homelessness,” of modular pieces by a group of our composers, writers, and singer-actors to partner with local organization serving the need of those suffering from shelter insecurity. I am excited about this collaboration and your participation.
I am very happy to work together.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Artists and Partners on View
Ruslan Bondar, the new Director of the Arundel Vocal Arts Society, will conduct "A Winter Day" concert with songs from around the world including beloved Christmas selections from Ruslan's Ukrainian heritage. The concert is on on Sunday, December 7 at 3:00 pm, at the Gloria Dei! Lutheran Church, 461 College Parkway, Arnold MD. Tickets available at the door or on-line HERE.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Company member Roz White is currently on the national tour of Hell's Kitchen which opened in Cleveland on October 10. Per the review, "(Roz) White brings grace and conviction to a stirring “Perfect Way to Die.” Full review HERE. The two-year tour will be in DC next year.