Scott Elmegreen is a playwright, composer, and author based in Chicago and Brooklyn. His shows have premiered on Broadway and off Broadway, have been produced around the world, and have been adapted to film for theatrical release, HBO, and Amazon Prime. His plays include Straight, Expecting, Troll, and Thucydides, and his musicals include Ghost of John McCain, Hip Hop Cinderella, Vote, COLLEGE The Musical, Ivy + Bean, The Magic School Bus, Ladybug Girl and Bumblebee Boy, and Awesome Allie First Kid Astronaut. He orchestrated S’Wonderful: The New Gershwin Musical, and wrote the music for Colin Quinn: Long Story Short, Piled Higher and Deeper, The Movie, and numerous off-Broadway plays. Under a pseudonym, he has written four science fiction novels published by HarperCollins.
Scott Elmegreen
Courses
TAPS 21860 Songwriting for Musical Theater
This course is a practical introduction to the art and craft of songwriting for musical theater. Students will analyze and practice song form, storytelling through music, and the writing of lyrics and melody for character and tone. In addition to presenting and workshopping new song material weekly, students will learn about orchestration, arrangement, and the structure of the theatrical score by discussing standout examples of the genre. As individuals or in teams of two, students will develop a catalog of character- and story-driven songs to be performed in cabaret at the end of the quarter. A basic ability to read music is expected; experience in songwriting is not required.
TAPS 10300 Text and Performance
This course offers an introduction to a number of significant dramatic works and seminal figures in the theorization of theater and performance. But the course's aspirations go much further: we will be concentrating upon the intersection of interpretation and enactment, asking how these pieces appear on stage and why. This will not be merely descriptive work, but crucially it will be interpretive and physical work. Students will prepare and present applied interpretations-that is, interpretations that enable conceptual insights to take artistic form. Throughout, we will be searching for that elusive combination of philological rigor, theoretical sophistication, and creative inspiration-probing the theoretical stakes of creativity and testing the creative implications of analytic insights.
TAPS 22360/32360 Advanced Musical Theater Writing
This course is an advanced, project-oriented writing workshop with an emphasis on dramatic structure, storytelling through music, and the exploration of character as practical matters. Each student will propose a new, full-length musical and will work towards the creation of a first draft over the course of the quarter. In addition to presenting and workshopping new scene or song material weekly, students will study, discuss, and draw inspiration from standout examples of the genre. Students will present excerpted readings from their musicals at the end of the course. Some experience in writing for musical theater is expected.