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thru your company!
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
Cabaret Season 2025-2026
Save the Dates!
We are happy to announce our second season of
the George Fulginiti Cabaret Series
at the Arts Club of Washington
and couldn’t be more excited about this year’s lineup.
These are a few of our favorite artists:
October 7 -- Josh Cleveland -- “One True Sentence”
December 2 – Melisa Bonetti -- “Carmen Meets Lola”
February 3 -- Javier Arrey -- “A Love Song to My Country South of the Border"
April 7 – Oren Levine & Aaron Myers “A Jazzy Something”
June 2 -- Alan Naylor -- “Songs We Need Now”
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.
You can always count on being part of a birthing process that is magic of music-theatre, or as our esteemed colleague Cara Schaefer calls it, “Seeing the back of the tapestry.”
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.
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Live & About 2025 Fall Season
We thank you for joining us in past seasons for our Live & About series and we invite you to come out to our 2025 Fall Outings. We have arranged an exciting season to four different productions in the DC area each month from September through December.
· September - we are going back to Signature Theatre for PLAY ON! featuring our own Greg Watkins in the role of Duke
· October - at the Arts Club of Washington for our Cabaret Series with Josh Cleveland
· November – at Theater Alliance, a new venue for us to see Furlough’s Paradise
· December – at GALA Hispanic Theatre for THE OTHER SIDE STORY
Check out our full Fall program with performance dates HERE.
If you are interested in joining us, email us at info@newmusictheatre.org
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Composer-Librettist Studio Recap
We are now planning our fourth annual 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 participants at our CL Studio this past June have offered some very positive comments on their experience.
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Featured Artist Josh Cleveland
Composer, song writer, librettist, music director, pianist, classroom educator, and cross-cultural former international aid worker, the man just doesn’t stop. It’s hard to believe Josh Cleveland has packed so much talent and variety of interest and experience into so few years. But this rich variety is just the kind of crossover artist we delight in in Alliance for New Music-Theatre. This is why we are so excited to have Josh open our second season of The George Fulginiti Series: Cabaret, Cocktails, and Conversation on October 7 at the Arts Club of Washington. And this is why we invite him and welcome him as our newest member into our company.
About the Cabaret Josh has created for this event, One True Sentence, he writes; "We live in a moment in which many people's sense of a shared reality is declining. We not only disagree; we disagree about the underlying facts of our world and our experience. It's all too tempting to try to hurl facts at those who would bury themselves in their conspiracy theories or, failing this, to retreat to our own echo chambers. Instead, why not take a page out of the novelists' playbook and counter misinformation with storytelling: with stories that are grounded in our own realities that ring true at a human, emotional level? Why not find, as Hemingway put it, "at least one true sentence?" Join me for an evening of original songs that tell versions of my own story as a young songwriter and educator, as well as songs drawn from musical theatre works I've written, including adaptations of The Great Gatsby and Despicable Me. I can't promise we'll heal our nation's fractious discourse in one night of musical storytelling. But maybe we can share a signature cocktail or two, open our ears, tell our own stories, and find a few true sentences along the way."
Josh, you have in the last two years been in NYC, part of a BMI Professional training program for musical theater artists, but we still consider you a member of our home team. So, how has your longtime home in DC impacted and shaped your work?
In a very real sense, I would not be doing what I am doing had I not lived in DC. I was on a one, even two quite different trajectories. Being in theater was never really my plan. My first dream was to work in international educational development. I worked for the Aga Khan Foundation in Kenya, Kyrgyzstan and India. Then I fast-tracked to teaching, moved to DC, and taught in a DC Public School and then a private Montessori school.
How did you connect with music and music-theater?
Music was always part of my life. Piano lessons when I was growing up, and I was always singing. I found musical theater in DC and truly found my community. It became the primary way I metabolized the world. So, since the winter of 2018, I have found myself involved with some music-theater project pretty continuously with community, youth theater, university and professional theaters.
You were part of our company’s Composer Librettist Studio in 2023, how did that experience have an impact on your artistic development?
Well, for one thing, I still have my [encyclopedically heavy] binder from the Studio. It was really my first chance to collaborate! Up until that point I had just been writing music and lyrics by myself. It was a crash course in collaboration, or, as leader Ben Krywosz put it, “creating a collaborative space.” It was a classic case of ‘I didn’t know how much I didn’t know.’ It was so lovingly put together. The curriculum felt so purposeful. There was such a cohort feel to it. Here are your fifteen friends for the next two plus weeks - Go create something—SOMETHING! That’s really the magic. Having now gone forward, I see mor every day how the magic happens when at least two collaborators have had the tough conversations and are on the same page artistically, who want to say the same thing about a thing, each doing what they do best, writing words or writing music ,the result coming that neither of them could do on their own. During the CL Studio, I got a taste of that and it was just so intoxicating. The most useful specific thing I took was the structure for feedback.
Yes, that is from Liz Lerman’s feedback process, but isn’t that a wonderful tool for collaboration.
Speaking of magic, so good. Such a smart, simple and malleable structure. The program I’m in now has no structure for providing feedback. And the CL Studio gave time for each work. And the general approach which supported curiosity and questioning – so smart.
We want to see your future work address some of the things you saw in different places in the world, yes?
This is why music-theater can best help us see and understand that ‘yes, you are my neighbor.’
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Our Artists and Partners on View
ROZ WHITE BIDS FAREWELL TO DC FOR A BROADWAY NATIONAL TOUR
On Monday August 18, a team from Alliance for New Music-Theatre showed up for Roz White in a cabaret sponsored by Metro Stage at The Lyceum in Old Town, Alexandria.
Roz performed a special program, “Soulmates in Song,” with Shanti Walker, putting their deep affection and long friendship on display. Complete with wig and costume changes, they showed us they were having a ball, and I swear at times it was as intimate an evening as sitting at Shanti’s kitchen table with the pair of them as they brought us into their journey through R&B, Blues, Jazz, Soul, and other musical influences. Her mellow mezzo was admirably matched by Shanti’s deeply rich and powerful baritone sound. And their band included the assured meaty pounding of pianist John Stanley, accomplished bassist Hamilton Hayes, and my long-time favorite Greg Holloway on drums. Two backup singers, Troy Sol Edler and David Hammett, were tagged to join them at the last minute and added energy and luster to the whole evening.
Nobody puts across a song, connecting so to the character and authentic emotion imbedded within as our Roz.
It was a bitter-sweet occasion. Roz leaves DC presently for NYC to prepare and take on the road the national tour of Hell’s Kitchen, Alicia Keys’ autobiographical musical, which has been running on Broadway for a year and a half. We will miss her but wish her a thrilling and musically satisfying adventure. Roz plays Miss Liza Jane, the role that won the Tony award for Kecia Lewis last year.