Oscar Greeley Clendenning Hammerstein II was an American lyricist, librettist, theatrical producer, and director in musical theater for nearly 40 years. He won eight Tony Awards and two Academy Awards for Best Original Song. Many of his songs are standard repertoire for vocalists and jazz musicians. He co-wrote 850 songs.
Stephen Joshua Sondheim was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical. With his frequent collaborators Harold Prince and James Lapine, Sondheim's Broadway musicals tackled unexpected themes that ranged beyond the genre's traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics were tinged with complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence about various aspects of life.
Adam Guettel is an American composer-lyricist of musical theater and opera. The grandson of musical theatre composer Richard Rodgers, he is best known for his musical The Light in the Piazza, for which he won the Tony Award for Best Original Score and the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations.
Terrence McNally was an American playwright, librettist, and screenwriter. Described as "the bard of American theater" and "one of the greatest contemporary playwrights the theater world has yet produced," McNally was the recipient of five Tony Awards. He won the Tony Award for Best Play for Love! Valour! Compassion! and Master Class and the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical for Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ragtime, and received the 2019 Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. He was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 1996, and he also received the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011 and the Lucille Lortel Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2018, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the highest recognition of artistic merit in the United States. His other accolades included an Emmy Award, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, two Obie Awards, and three Hull-Warriner Awards.
Jonathan David Larson was an American composer, lyricist and playwright most famous for writing the musicals Rent and Tick, Tick... Boom!, which explored the social issues of multiculturalism, substance use disorder, and homophobia. He received three posthumous Tony Awards and a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Rent.
Stephen Lawrence Schwartz is an American musical theatre composer and lyricist. In a career spanning over five decades, Schwartz has written such hit musicals as Godspell (1971), Pippin (1972), and Wicked (2003). He has contributed lyrics to a number of successful films, including Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), The Prince of Egypt, and Enchanted (2007).
John Weidman is an American librettist and television writer for Sesame Street. He has worked on stage musicals with Stephen Sondheim and Susan Stroman.
Lynn Ahrens is an American songwriter, and librettist for the musical theatre, television and film. She has collaborated with Stephen Flaherty for many years. She won the Tony Award, Drama Desk Award, and Outer Critics Circle Award for the Broadway musical Ragtime. Together with Flaherty, she has written many musicals, including Lucky Stiff, My Favorite Year, Ragtime, Seussical, A Man of No Importance, Dessa Rose, The Glorious Ones, Rocky, Little Dancer and, recently on Broadway, Anastasia and Once on This Island.
Playwrights Horizons is a not-for-profit American Off-Broadway theater located in New York City dedicated to the support and development of contemporary American playwrights, composers, and lyricists, and to the production of their new work.
Peter Parnell is an American Broadway and Off-Broadway playwright, television writer, and children's book author. Parnell is also Vice-President of the Dramatists Guild of America, the professional association of playwrights, composers, lyricists, and librettists.
Bree Lowdermilk is an American musical theater composer and lyricist.
Philip Kan Gotanda is an American playwright and filmmaker and a third generation Japanese American. Much of his work deals with Asian American issues and experiences.
The Hull-Warriner Award is an award bestowed by the Dramatists Guild of America. The award is unique in that it is given by dramatists to dramatists. It is presented annually by the Dramatists Guild Council to an author, or team of authors, in recognition of their work dealing with difficult subjects including political, religious, and social mores of the times.
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.
Chicago Dramatists is a theatre in River West, West Town, Chicago, Illinois, USA, focused on nurturing playwrights and developing new plays. It was founded in 1979 by Russ Tutterow and is notable for its Network Playwright Program, which offers classes, readings and critiques to writers of all abilities, and readings of new works for the general public. In 1998, the theatre received a special Jeff Award for its almost two decades of developing plays and playwrights in a manner that has enhanced Chicago's reputation for being a cradle for new theatre works. The theater space itself is small and intimate, seating 77.
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.
Diana Miae Son is an American playwright, television producer, and writer. She is known for her work on American Crime, Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Southland, and Blue Bloods. She, along with Brian Yorkey, has also served as the showrunner for 13 Reasons Why.
Sara Cooper is a New York-based playwright-lyricist and librettist.
The Richard Rodgers Award is an annual award presented by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was created and endowed by Richard Rodgers in 1978 for the development of new works in musical theatre. These awards provide financial support for full productions, studio productions, and staged readings of new and developing works of musical theatre, and to nurture early-career composers, lyricists and playwrights by enabling their musicals to be produced by nonprofit theatres in New York City. The winners are selected by a jury of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Richard Rodgers Awards are the Academy's only awards for which applications are accepted.
Benjamin Velez is an American composer and lyricist.
