On this week’s episode of On Broadway, I chat with Adam Gwon, an American composer and lyricist. He made his off-Broadway debut in 2009 with Ordinary Days, the first musical production in Roundabout Theatre Company’s black box space. He has written eight other musicals that have premiered Off-Broadway and at major regional theaters across the country.
Gwon has been a recipient of the Fred Ebb Foundation Award, presented to aspiring composer/lyricists, as well as the Kleban Prize for most promising musical theater lyricist.
In addition to talking about his career, we will discuss his latest musical, All the World’s a Stage.
THIS EPISODE WILL BE AVAILABLE BY FRIDAY.
ABOUT ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE
Adam Gwon’s new musical All the World’s a Stage is a “disarmingly powerful” “100-minute marvel” (The New York Times), a ★★★★★ “rare kind of show” (Metro Weekly) with “one of the best new scores of recent memory” (Gay City News).
As a gay teacher at small-town Valley High, Ricky Alleman knows what part he has to play. That is, until Sam, an offbeat student, enlists his help to win the 1996 State Thespian Competition — her ticket out of their provincial town. When Sam’s monologue puts them in the crosshairs of a local church, Ricky finds his job and his carefully constructed life under threat. But the only way to rescue Sam may be to risk it all to show her she’s not alone.
Named “Best Musical” by the Off-Broadway Alliance Awards, All the World’s a Stage is the “unmissable” (New York Stage Review) new show from “one of the most emotionally honest voices in contemporary musical theater (Times Square Chronicles).
ABOUT ADAM GWON
Adam Gwon is a musical theater writer named one of “50 to Watch” by The Dramatist magazine and hailed “a promising newcomer to our talent-hungry musical theater” whose songs are “funny, urbane, with a sweetness that doesn’t cloy” by The New York Times.
His musicals have been produced on six continents, in ten languages. Off-Broadway: All the World’s a Stage (Keen Company, Drama Desk nomination, Off-Broadway Alliance Award winner, Best Musical), Scotland, PA (Roundabout Theatre, Drama Desk Award nomination, NYT Critic’s Pick), Ordinary Days (Roundabout Theatre; Keen Company, Drama League Award nomination, Best Revival), Old Jews Telling Jokes (Westside Theatre, NYT Critic’s Pick); Regional: Witnesses (California Center for the Arts, Craig Noel Award winner, Outstanding New Musical), String (Village Theatre), Cake Off (Signature Theatre, Helen Hayes Award nomination; Bucks County Playhouse), Cloudlands (South Coast Repertory, LA Times Critic’s Pick), The Boy Detective Fails (Signature Theatre), Bernice Bobs Her Hair (Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma); West End: Ordinary Days (Trafalgar Studios).
Other projects include The Waves in Quarantine (a film collaboration with Lisa Peterson and Raúl Esparza), songs as a staff writer on the hit webseries Submissions Only, and for Stephen Schwartz and John Tartaglia’s The Secret Silk on Princess Cruise Lines.
Adam is the proud recipient of the Kleban Award, the Fred Ebb Award, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Frederick Loewe Award, the Second Stage Theatre Donna Perret Rosen Award, the Weston Playhouse New Musical Award, the ASCAP Harold Adamson Award, and the MAC John Wallowitch Award, as well as commissions from Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Keen Company, Signature Theatre, South Coast Repertory, the Kimmel Center, and Broadway Across America. His songs have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and more, performed by such luminaries as Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara, and Brian d’Arcy James.
Recordings of Adam’s work include the cast albums of All the World’s a Stage (Joy Machine Records), Ordinary Days (Ghostlight Records) and String (Brainstorm Records), Audra McDonald’s Go Back Home (Nonesuch), Artists in Residence (Broadway Records), The Essential Liz Callaway (Working Girl Records), Tracy Lynn Olivera’s Because, and Over the Moon: The Broadway Lullaby Project (Entertainment One).
Adam has been a fellow at MacDowell, Hermitage Artist Retreat, the O’Neill Music Theater Conference, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, and the Dramatists Guild, is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild. He served on the Tony Awards Nominating Committee from 2015-2018, and currently sits on the Dramatists Guild Council and the Boards at Roundabout Theatre Company and Primary Stages.
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