Double your impact
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
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The George Fulginiti Series: Cabaret, Cocktails, & Conversation
We are happy to announce our second season of
The George Fulginiti Cabaret Series
at the Arts Club of Washington
We start our season on Tuesday, October 7
with Josh Cleveland in his original program
“One True Sentence”
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Click on the photo to see Josh just warming up at the Arts Club.
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.
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.
These are the other artists in our season:
December 2 – Melisa Bonetti -- “Carmen Meets Lola”
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.
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In Flanders Fields
This 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’ll 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.
Attire: Period Dress – Medals and Pearls are encouraged
Tickets available 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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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.
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Featured Artist John Boulanger
John Boulanger has been a company member and close collaborator since 2009. Some of the roles he has helped develop have been George Putnam, husband to Amelia Earhart, in Waiting for Amelia with composers Ann Hoopes and Robert B. Johnson, The Inspector in Woman Changed Into a Fox, again with Johnson in collaboration with writer Susan Galbraith, as Alquist in an adaptation of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. by composer Maurice Saylor. In 2020, John was featured in the company’s digital series Short Gems as Caesar in a theatrical response to a Man Ray painting in the Phillips Collection, created in celebration for the Museum’s Centennial anniversary. In 2024, this opera, The Man Ray Project: Caesar & The Mannequin, by composer Andrew Earle Simpson with librettist Susan Galbraith, was expanded and produced live at Atlas Center of Performing Arts.
John says he loves his long association with New Music-Theatre and being part of sharing the process of development in various stages from the ground floor. He said, “So much of our work has been uncannily prescient – timely and then timely again.”
John has sung with the Washington National Opera for 22 years and performed in 35 operas at both the Kennedy Center and DAR. He performed the titular roles in Don Giovanni and Tartuffe with The Forgotten Opera Company, and. with the Theater Lab, he was featured as Rochester in an original musical adaptation of Jane Eyre. John’s repertoire spans Gregorian chant to 21st century music theatre works and just about everything in between that can possibly be performed—from Dufay to Duruflé and Schubert to Schoenberg. Whatever the musical genre, John believes communication is the ultimate goal, both through the spoken or sung text and through various non-verbal means.
John’s passion for words and music has been exercised fully in his curation of In Flanders Fields, a project he began working on in 2017. The work featuring WWI poets was first showcased that same year at Woodrow Wilson House as part of National Poetry Month. That year also marked the hundredth anniversary of when the US joined the war.
John later discovered the writings of Jay Chapman and found a perfect family and dramatic arc to tell the story of a time of turmoil in our nation’s history. And Chapman’s “Practical Agitation” couldn’t be more relevant and or speak more urgently to our times. John is delighted to be sharing a special expanded program of WWI letters, poetry, and song marking Armistice Day, November 11 at the Arts Club of Washington.
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Our Artists and Partners on View
Ronald “Trey” Walton Launches new Opera
New Music-Theatre Composer Ronald “Trey” Walton presents his latest opera Echoes of the Bridge -“A Bloody Sunday” for one performance only on September 20 at 5 p.m. at Trinity Episcopal Church.
Trey has been a member of our company since 2021 when he was introduced to us as a precocious and prodigiously talented composer having only just graduated from Duke Ellington School for the Performing Arts. We commissioned him to compose an original opera about the history of two historic Black cemeteries in the heart of Georgetown. That opera, Voices of Zion, was produced in 2022 in partnership with Black Georgetown Org and Dumbarton United Methodist Church. The production included choruses from both DUMC and Mount Zion Church, DC’s oldest Black congregation.
Following this, Trey teamed up with Librettist Susan Galbraith to write a “Part 2” to the Black history of Georgetown and the significant role members of Mount Zion Church played in building community and securing for our city first universal freedom. DC Emancipation & The Right to Vote has had two successful workshop showcases and we are seeking funding for a full production run to bring this too-little-known story to young and old across the city.
Trey also participated in our inaugural Composer Librettist Studio in 2023.We hope you will join us now in supporting our wonderful friend and composer on September 20 when he launches his newest work.
Trinity Episcopal Church is at 7005 Piney Branch Road, NW. Tickets available HERE and at the door.