American Music Theatre Festival
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American Music Theatre Festival
The Prince Theater is a non-profit theatrical producing organization located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and specializing in music theatre, including opera, music drama, musical comedy and experimental forms. Founded in 1984 as the American Music Theater Festival by Marjorie Samoff, Eric Salzman and Ron Kaiserman, for the first 15 years AMTF performed in various venues throughout Philadelphia. In March 1999, AMTF moved into the renovated Midtown Theater and changed its name in honor of Broadway producer and director Harold Prince,. AMTF/Prince Theater has produced 92 world premieres and has sent 81 productions to theaters in New York and worldwide. Works The Prince Theater productions (primarily as the American Music Theater Festival) have included the world premieres of * Julie Taymor, Elliot Goldenthal and Sidney Goldfarb's ''The Transposed Heads'' * Anthony Davis' ''X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X'' * Duke Ellington's ''Queenie Pie'' * Emily Mann, Ntozake Shange, and Ba ...
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Philadelphia
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since 1854, the city has been coextensive with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the Delaware Valley, the nation's seventh-largest and one of world's largest metropolitan regions, with 6.245 million residents . The city's population at the 2020 census was 1,603,797, and over 56 million people live within of Philadelphia. Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Penn, an English Quaker. The city served as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony during the British colonial era and went on to play a historic and vital role as the central meeting place for the nation's founding fathers whose plans and actions in Philadelphia ultimately inspired the American Revolution and the nation's inde ...
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Eric Salzman
Eric Salzman (September 8, 1933 – November 12, 2017) was an American composer, scholar, author, impresario, music critic, and record producer. He is known for advancing the concept of "New Music Theater" (in his compositions and his large body of writing) as an independent art form differing in scope, both economically and aesthetically, from grand opera and contemporary popular musicals. He co-founded the American Music Theater Festival and was, at the time of his death in 2017, Composer-in-Residence at the Center for Contemporary Opera. Salzman's one true opera, ''Big Jim and the Small-Time Investors'' (written and revised between 1985 and 2017), was developed in workshops at CCO in 2010 and 2014. It received its world-premiere production at Symphony Space in 2018, five months after his death, praised by Opera News as "truly a fine piece of post-modern creative work." Performers of his works include the New York Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Minnesota Orch ...
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Lee Breuer
Esser Leopold Breuer (February 6, 1937 – January 3, 2021) was an American playwright, theater director, academic, educator, filmmaker, poet, and lyricist. Breuer taught and directed on six continents. Career Breuer was a founding co-artistic director of Mabou Mines, Mabou Mines Theater Company in New York City, which Breuer began in 1970 with colleagues Philip Glass, Ruth Maleczech, JoAnne Akalaitis, David Warrilow, and Frederick Neumann. Since the birth of the company, Breuer worked with Mabou Mines. In 2013, Breuer directed the ''La Divina Caricatura: Part I The Shaggy Dog'' which was co-produced by Mabou Mines. In 2005, Breuer's previous Mabou Mines production ''Red Beads,'' was adapted by Breuer from a Russian folk story, created in collaboration with puppeteer Basil Twist and composer Ushio Torikai. Of the September 2005 New York City premiere, the ''New York Times'' critic wrote "...theater as sorcery; it is a crossroads where artistic traditions meet to invent a marvelo ...
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Bob Telson
Robert Eria Telson (born May 14, 1949) is an American composer, songwriter, and pianist best known for his work in musical theater and film, for which he has received Tony, Pulitzer, and Academy Award nominations. Biography Robert Eria Telson was born in Cannes, France, in 1949. He grew up in Brooklyn, New York, son of Paula (née Blackman) and David Telson. He began studying piano when he was five years old. By nine he had already performed a Mozart piece on television and given a concert of his own compositions. At 14, he wrote 72 love songs for his first girlfriend, Margie. At 16 and 17 he studied organ, counterpoint and harmony in France with the teacher Nadia Boulanger. He followed this with a degree in music from Harvard University in 1970. Telson also played organ and composed original songs for a rock band called The Bristols, while he was a high school student at Poly Prep in Brooklyn, New York. Several of these were recorded at Decca Studios but never released. At Harvar ...
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Baikida Carroll
Baikida Carroll (born January 15, 1947) is an American jazz trumpeter. Carroll studied at Southern Illinois University and at the Armed Forces School of Music. Following this he became a member of the Black Artists Group in St. Louis, where he directed their big band. This group recorded in Europe in the 1970s. Biography Carroll was born in St. Louis, Missouri, United States, and attended Vashon High School, Vashon and Soldan High School. He studied trumpet with Vernon Nashville. His early influences were Clark Terry and Lee Morgan. Carroll worked with the All City Jazz Band, whose members included Lester Bowie, J.D. Parran and James ”Jabbo” Ware. While still in high school he worked with Albert King, Little Milton, and Oliver Sain. Carroll joined the United States Army in 1965 and served in the 3rd Infantry Division (United States), 3rd Infantry Division Band in Wurzburg, Germany. In 1968, he returned to St. Louis and led the Baikida Carroll Sextet, also becoming orchestra co ...
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Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange ( ;
FilmReference.com. Retrieved October 27, 2018.
October 18, 1948 – October 27, 2018) was an American playwright and poet. As a , she addressed issues relating to and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her -winning play, ''

Emily Mann (director)
Emily Betsy Mann (born April 12, 1952) is an American director, playwright and screenwriter. She served as the artistic director and resident playwright of the McCarter Theatre Center from 1990 to 2020. Career As the McCarter Theatre Center's Artistic Director and Resident Playwright from 1990 to 2020, Mann oversaw more than 160 productions, including more than 40 world premieres. During her tenure, the theater won the Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre and Mann herself was twice nominated for Tony Awards as a playwright and director. She was inducted into The American Theater Hall of Fame. Her other personal awards include the Peabody Award, the Hull-Warriner Award from the Dramatists Guild, awards from the NAACP, eight Obie awards, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 2011 Person of the Year Award from the National Theater Conference, as well as the Margo Jones Award, given to a "citizen-of-the-theatre who has demonstrated a lifetime commitment to the encouragement of the l ...
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Duke Ellington
Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington (April 29, 1899 – May 24, 1974) was an American jazz pianist, composer, and leader of his eponymous jazz orchestra from 1923 through the rest of his life. Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Ellington was based in New York City from the mid-1920s and gained a national profile through his orchestra's appearances at the Cotton Club in Harlem. A master at writing miniatures for the three-minute 78 rpm recording format, Ellington wrote or collaborated on more than one thousand compositions; his extensive body of work is the largest recorded personal jazz legacy, and many of his pieces have become standards. He also recorded songs written by his bandsmen, such as Juan Tizol's " Caravan", which brought a Spanish tinge to big band jazz. At the end of the 1930s, Ellington began a nearly thirty-year collaboration with composer-arranger-pianist Billy Strayhorn, whom he called his writing and arranging companion. With Strayhorn, he composed multipl ...
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X, The Life And Times Of Malcolm X
''X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X'' is an opera with music by Anthony Davis and libretto by Thulani Davis, to a story by Christopher Davis. It is based on the life of the civil rights leader Malcolm X. Performance history The opera premiered in a full production at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, PA on October 9, 1985 and was subsequently revised and expanded for a production at the New York City Opera on September 28, 1986. The latter was listed as the world premiere in accordance with an agreement made between then-NYCO artistic director Beverly Sills, and AMTF directors Eric Salzman and Marjorie Samoff. The Oakland Opera Theater performed the work in June 2006. New York City Opera presented an abridged concert version on May 12, 2010 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. It is scheduled for the 2023-24 season at New York's Metropolitan Opera, premiering in November 3, 2023. Roles *Malcolm (baritone) *Elijah/Street (high tenor) *Louise/B ...
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Anthony Davis (composer)
Anthony Davis (born February 20, 1951) is an American pianist and composer. He incorporates several styles including jazz, rhythm 'n' blues, gospel, non-Western, African, European classical, Indonesian gamelan, and experimental music. He has played with several groups and is also professor of music at University of California, San Diego. Davis is perhaps best known for his operas; he has been called "the dean of African-American opera composers." His better known compositions include '' X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X'', which was premiered by the New York City Opera in 1986; ''Amistad'', which premiered with the Lyric Opera of Chicago in 1997; and '' Wakonda's Dream'', which premiered at Opera Omaha in 2007. His opera '' The Central Park Five'' premiered on June 15, 2019 at the Long Beach Opera Company in California. It won him a Pulitzer Prize for Music on May 4, 2020. Biography Davis was born in Paterson, New Jersey in 1951. He has a 1975 degree from Yale University, and ha ...
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Sidney Goldfarb
Sidney Goldfarb (born November 23, 1942 in Peabody, Massachusetts) is a Harvard College-educated American poet and experimental playwright, whose work continues the tradition of poetic theater. Goldfarb co-founded the acclaimed Creative Writing Program at the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1975, serving as its first director. He continues to teach there today. He is the recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, including a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1968), a National Endowment for the Arts grant (1970), a Goethe Foundation Grant (1984), and multiple grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. Books *''Speech, for Instance'' (poetry), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969 *''Messages'' (poetry), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971 *''Curve in the Road'' (poetry), Halty-Ferguson, 1980 *''The Rushes of Tulsa and Other Plays'' (poetic theater), Barrytown-Station Hill, 2008 Plays (Dates indicate first production) *''Pedro Páramo'' (adapted from the novel by ...
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Elliot Goldenthal
Elliot Goldenthal (born May 2, 1954) is an American composer of contemporary classical music and film and theatrical scores. A student of Aaron Copland and John Corigliano, he is best known for his distinctive style and ability to blend various musical styles and techniques in original and inventive ways. He won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2002 for his score to the motion picture ''Frida'', directed by his longtime partner Julie Taymor. Early life and education Goldenthal was born on May 2, 1954, the youngest son of a Jewish housepainter father and a Catholic seamstress mother in Brooklyn, New York City, where he was influenced from an early age by music from all cultures and genres. Both pairs of Goldenthal's grandparents emigrated to the United States from Bucharest and Iași, Romania. Goldenthal lived in a multi-cultural part of town, and this is reflected in his works. He attended John Dewey High School in Brooklyn where, at the age of 14, he had his very fi ...
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