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#WCW Casey Keenan & Glass A New Musical

  • Anie Delgado
  • Jun 22, 2016
  • 5 min read

Casey Keenan, an up and coming composer, writer, and lyricist took some time out of her busy tech-week to tell me a bit more about Glass: A New Musical which is now sold out for it’s Wednesday performance at The Play Room Theater. You can still get tickets for the Saturday performance here, but hurry they are going quickly!

The promising writer told me she started writing Glass around two years ago. I first met Casey through a mutual friend at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy, nicknamed AMDA, where we both studied around the same time. I graduated a few semesters before her, but one night returned to campus to see the school’s famed Cafe Series. That was the first time I heard Keenan’s music and I was blown away. I’ve always gravitated towards contemporary musical theatre. Though the classics are what established the beautiful art-form, contemporary writers are making strides in telling the stories of real people, today, from all walks of life. Casey Keenan is no exception. Her small ensemble performed one of the numbers from what would become Glass. The piece was visceral in heart and it’s melodies soared over the chilling harmonies. Goosebumps invaded my arms as I watched Casey play the piano expertly whilst playing a character in her own piece and knew this wasn’t the last I’d hear of her music.

"Goosebumps invaded my arms as I watched Casey

play the piano expertly whilst playing a character

in her own piece and knew this wasn’t the

last I’d hear of her music."

Glass was soon later selected to be performed at Lincoln Center’s College Cabaret gaining more exposure and just recently was it selected for the NYC Women’s Work Festival where it’s first full production will premiere tonight. Due to the “magnitude” of the project, Keenan and her cast and creative team started rehearsals about three months ago. Keenan says, “Learning a whole new set of songs that no one's ever heard and getting your mind around the idea of this concept is kind of challenging.” Having participated in two workshops of a new musical last year, I know the feeling. Though it’s a challenge when you constantly have new material in front of you, it’s also incredibly magical to work with the writer first-hand and bring their story to life for the first time.

Keenan didn’t always know she was going to be a composer, though she was enamoured by musical theatre music from a young age. Keenan started by watching the greats, “I was aware of Stephen Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein from a young age, but never thought I was even remotely capable of something like that; West Side Story, my big obsession, is this symphonic and lyrical masterpiece and then Sweeney Todd is just incomprehensible.” As musical theatre progressed so did Casey’s love for it. She says, “Hearing Jason Robert Brown's The Last 5 Years was a life changing experience for me; I didn't realize that musicals could evolve, could become modern.” The Last 5 Years is one of Brown’s most well-known works indeed evolving musical theatre. Last year, the show made it to the big screen with big-names like Anna Kendrick, a momentous step for musical theatre, making the art-form accessible to people all over the world that may have not been exposed to theatre before. Keenan was also inspired by the likes of Alexander Sage Oyen who made her realize that musical theatre could be “relatable” and made her feel “understood.” When Casey started studying at AMDA, she took a course in composition with Peter Susser and Paul D. Mills two gentlemen who proved to be catalysts in Casey’s career in composing. “[They] really believed in me, urging me to pursue composing on a grander scale. They told me about the BMI workshop, which I'm now a part of, and the rest is history!” Having studied under Mills and Susser myself, I can attest to their positive impact on student’s careers. They truly are a dynamic duo. Peter Susser teaches at Columbia University and AMDA and is a composer and producer. Paul D. Mills is an AMDA alumni, instructor, and a composer.

“[They] really believed in me, urging me to pursue composing

on a grander scale. They told me about the BMI workshop,

which I'm now a part of, and the rest is history!”

Glass: A New Musical centers around Kate who is going to her friends’ wedding and is taking a trip down memory lane on her way there. Like myself, Keenan is in her twenties and has a lot of inspiration to draw from when it comes to coming of age stories like Glass. She told me the inspiration for the piece came from her time at Texas Tech University. Casey is a keen observer of human nature. Having enrolled in Texas Tech two years after most of her peers, she took the first few days to observe the nature of her surrounding peers and their relationships. “I'll be the first to admit that I make very snap judgements when I first meet people and, naturally, a lot of these turn out horribly wrong. It's actually funny how wrong I am about people on average...I ended up making little story lines about them based on the few interactions I saw and voila, Glass was born.” Though Keenan drew inspiration from people she knew in Texas, “None of the characters resemble the people [she] based them on originally.” Casey says she wouldn’t want to be friends with most of the characters in Glass but made amazing friends at Texas Tech.

"It's actually funny how wrong

I am about people on average."

It’s no secret that we are amidst another feminist revolution. Women-lead projects are popping everywhere from indie theatre to Hollywood. For instance, Jessica Chastain just started a women-driven production company. Likewise, a video featuring some of the most prominent female actresses just went viral communicating their frustration with men’s confessed “inability” to write from a female perspective. Women like Emma Watson, Malala Yousefzai, Jessica Chastain and more are making strides and paving the way for women like Casey and I who aspire to create work for women that is told from their perspective and is not demeaning nor degrading for women. Someone participating in a Women’s Work Festival must be driven to join the movement and create waves with these other amazing ladies. Casey says “I’ve been surrounded by strong women my entire life. My mother was a Marine Corps officer and I attended an all girl's school, so I've always been very passionate about [equality] and involvement. Women are still both underrepresented and misrepresented in the industry, especially compositorially. Front runners like Jeanine Tesori are such an inspiration to me and remind me that I just need to be confident in my work and seek out the support and strength of other female artists. Our production team is all women and I've found the process to be so rewarding. I want one day to see shows where a woman's presence can not be credited to a man's presence, a show where a woman isn't just in love and sick about it. Glass is about a woman's perspective on a man's behavior and how it affects a woman's behavior.”

"I want one day to see shows where a woman's presence

can not be credited to a man's presence, a show

where a woman isn't just in love and sick about it."

That statement says it all. While we are a long way from equality in the entertainment industry creatives like Casey Keenan are constantly working to close the gap and generate equality. Glass: The Musical premieres tonight at The Play Room Theater and is sold out. You can purchase tickets for the Saturday performance here. A big thank you to Ms. Keenan for talking to me about her show. I am so excited to see it tonight!

xo

A


 
 
 

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