Benjamin Velez | |
---|---|
Born | 1988 (age 35–36) Miami, Florida |
Genres | Musical Theater |
Occupation(s) | Composer, Lyricist |
Website | www |
Benjamin Velez (born 1988) is an American composer and lyricist. [1] [2] [3] [4]
Velez was born in Miami, Florida. [5] He is a graduate of Columbia University where he studied film and wrote the 114th annual Varsity Show. [1]
Velez joined the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theater Workshop in 2010, where he developed multiple projects, including Afterland, [6] Starblasters, [7] and Borderline. [8]
With book writer and co-lyricist Katie Hathaway, Velez developed Afterland at the Yale Institute for Music Theater (2014), the York Theater (2016), [9] and as a part of several concert series in New York City, including Cutting Edge Composers [10] [11] and a One Night Stand at Ars Nova (2018). [12] Starblasters had a reading at Dixon Place in 2018. [13]
Velez wrote the score for Borderline, an original musical created with book writer Aryanna Garber, which won the 2018 Weston Playhouse New Musical Award [14] and opened the 2019 O’Neill National Musical Theater Conference. [15] [16]
Velez wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics (with David Kamp) for Kiss My Aztec, a new musical from John Leguizamo directed by Tony Taccone. It was developed at the Public Theater and premiered at Berkeley Repertory Theater and La Jolla Playhouse in 2019, where it received critical acclaim. [17] [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] Kiss My Aztec had its East Coast premiere at Hartford Stage in 2022. [23]
In 2023, Velez was commissioned by the Public Theater to write a musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest for its Public Works program, directed by Laurie Woolery. [24] [25] It premiered in August 2023 at Shakespeare in the Park and was the final production at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park before its planned 18-month renovation. The production starred Renée Elise Goldsberry as Prospero and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. [26]
Kander and Ebb were a highly successful American songwriting team consisting of composer John Kander and lyricist Fred Ebb. Known primarily for their stage musicals, which include Cabaret and Chicago, Kander and Ebb also scored several movies, including Martin Scorsese's New York, New York. Their most famous song is the theme song of that movie. Recorded by many artists, "New York, New York" became a signature song for Frank Sinatra. The team also became associated with two actresses, Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera, for whom they wrote a considerable amount of material for the stage, concerts and television.
John Harold Kander is an American composer and composer, known largely for his work in the musical theater. As part of the songwriting team Kander and Ebb, Kander wrote the scores for 15 musicals, including Cabaret (1966) and Chicago (1975), both of which were later adapted into acclaimed films. He and Ebb also wrote the standard "New York, New York" . He and Ebb sang All That Jazz from Chicago.
Fred Ebb was an American musical theatre lyricist who had many successful collaborations with composer John Kander. The Kander and Ebb team frequently wrote for such performers as Liza Minnelli and Chita Rivera.
Alan Irwin Menken is an American composer, pianist, music director, and record producer, best known for his scores and songs for films produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios. Menken's music for The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), and Pocahontas (1995) has each won him two Academy Awards. He also composed the scores and songs for Little Shop of Horrors (1986), Newsies (1992), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Home on the Range (2004), Enchanted (2007), Tangled (2010), and Disenchanted (2022), among others. His accolades include winning eight Academy Awards — becoming the second most prolific Oscar winner in the music categories after Alfred Newman, a Tony Award, eleven Grammy Awards, seven Golden Globe Awards, and a Daytime Emmy Award. Menken is one of nineteen people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.
Douglas Wright is an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Wright first earned acclaim earning the Obie Award for Best Playwright for his darkly satirical play Quills (1995) about the final days of the French sadist and author Marquis de Sade. He later adapted it into the 2000 film of the same name earning a nomination for the Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay. He went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award for Best Play in Broadway debut play I Am My Own Wife (2004).
Edward "Ed" Kleban was an American musical theatre composer and lyricist. Kleban was born in the Bronx, New York City, in 1939 and graduated from New York's High School of Music & Art and Columbia University, where he attended with future playwright Terrence McNally.
Jonathan Freeman is an American actor and singer. He is known for voicing Jafar in Disney's Aladdin franchise, as well as the Kingdom Hearts franchise and the 2011 Aladdin musical.
Michael Jerrod Moore, known professionally as Michael Arden, is an American actor, singer, musician, and theatre director. Arden won a Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 2023 for the revival of the musical Parade.
Jeff Blumenkrantz is an American actor, composer and lyricist.
A. Lehman Engel was an American composer and conductor of Broadway musicals, television and film.
Amanda Green is an American actress, singer, and songwriter. In 2021, she was elected president of the Dramatists Guild of America, the first woman to hold the role in the Guild's 100-year history.
Tony Taccone is an American theater director, and the former artistic director of Berkeley Repertory Theatre in Berkeley, California.
Neil Bartram is a musical theatre composer/lyricist based in New York. Bartram is the composer and lyricist of Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Theory of Relativity and Broadway's The Story of My Life with book writer Brian Hill.
Thomas Robert Kitt is an American composer, conductor, orchestrator, and musician. For his score for the musical Next to Normal, he shared the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Brian Yorkey. He has also won two Tony Awards and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Next to Normal, as well as Tony and Outer Critics Circle nominations for If/Then and SpongeBob SquarePants. He has been nominated for eight Drama Desk Awards, winning one, and a Grammy Award for Best Musical Theater Album for Jagged Little Pill in 2021.
Brian Yorkey is an American playwright and lyricist. His works often explore dark and controversial subject matter such as mental illness, grief, the underbelly of suburbia, and ethics in both psychiatry and public education.
Chaplin: The Musical, formerly titled Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin, is a musical with music and lyrics by Christopher Curtis and book by Curtis and Thomas Meehan. The show is based on the life of Charlie Chaplin. The musical, which started at the New York Musical Theatre Festival in 2006, debuted at the La Jolla Playhouse in 2010, and then premiered on Broadway in 2012.
Timothy Huang is a Taiwanese American playwright, actor, composer and lyricist. He is the creator of the award-winning one-man musical, The View from Here, the song cycle LINES, and "American Morning", aka Costs of Living, the latter of which won the 2016 Richard Rodgers Award for Musical Theater. He is the third Asian American to win the award since its creation and the first to win as a triple threat composer/lyricist/librettist.
Maria-Christina Oliveras is an American television, stage and film actress, singer and voice-over artist. She has performed extensively on Broadway, Off-Broadway, regionally, and in various films and television series, and is known for her versatility and transformational character work in a number of world premieres. She is of Filipino and Puerto Rican descent.
Dear Worthy Editor: Letters to The Daily Forward is a 1960s or c. 1974 musical and one of the early works by Alan Menken. He collaborated with his mother to develop the musical, adapted from the Bintel Brief letters-to-the-editor published by the Yiddish-language newspaper Jewish Daily Forward. While Menken had written musicals prior to this, it became his first work to achieve a level of success, being performed many times in the Jewish-American circuit.
Bruce Howard Sussman is an American lyricist and librettist. Though he has collaborated with numerous composers, he is probably best known for his work with his long-time collaborator, Barry Manilow. Together, they have written over two hundred songs for numerous recording artists, films, stage musicals and television programs.