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Michael Patrick Walker | |
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| Education | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Occupations |
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| Notable work | Altar Boyz |
| Website | michaelpatrickwalker |
Michael Patrick Walker is a composer, lyricist, writer, and musician.
|
Michael Patrick Walker | |
|---|---|
| Education | Carnegie Mellon University |
| Occupations |
|
| Notable work | Altar Boyz |
| Website | michaelpatrickwalker |
Michael Patrick Walker is a composer, lyricist, writer, and musician.
Walker was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and raised in New Freedom, Pennsylvania. He lived in Pittsburgh for several years while earning his bachelor's degree from Carnegie Mellon University [1] and then moved to New York City, where he currently resides. He played piano and keyboards and/or conducted for various theatrical Broadway, Off-Broadway, and touring productions including Frozen , Aladdin , If/Then , Avenue Q (conductor), the Roundabout Theatre Company's production of The Tin Pan Alley Rag (music director/arranger), Wicked , The Lion King , Thoroughly Modern Millie , and tick, tick... BOOM! (conductor).
Walker, with fellow composer/lyricist Gary Adler and book writer Kevin Del Aguila, wrote and created the Off-Broadway musical Altar Boyz , [2] which won the 2005 Outer Critics Circle Award for Best Off-Broadway Musical. [3] Additionally, the show was nominated for seven Drama Desk Awards (including two each for Walker and Adler for Best Music and for Best Lyrics) [4] and four Lucille Lortel Awards including Best Off-Broadway Musical. The show ran for 2,032 performances, making it the ninth-longest running Off-Broadway musical of all time. [5] It has been translated into multiple languages to be performed around the world.
From 2005 through 2008, Walker composer numerous songs for the Emmy-nominated Disney Channel TV Series Johnny and the Sprites , becoming the music director and supervisor for Season 2 of the show. In this capacity, Walker served as the lead composer, oversaw a team of theatre composers who wrote the original songs for each episode, and developed the stories for each of 26 scripts for the series. He also arranged, orchestrated, and produced the recordings of the songs and co-produced the CD for the series. Season 2 of Johnny and the Sprites received four Daytime Emmy Award nominations, including one for Outstanding Pre-School Children's Series. His involvement lead to his writing original music and lyrics for the Nick Jr. Channel television show Olivia.
In 2009, another musical Walker co-created and for which he wrote the score, The Distant Bells, was selected as a finalist for the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center's musical theater conference. This led to a 2011 reading produced by the Roundabout Theatre Company which starred Chita Rivera, Ana Gasteyer, and Rachel York.
On November 8, 2011, Walker's album of his music and lyrics, Out of Context: The Songs of Michael Patrick Walker , was released on the Yellow Sound Label. [6] It includes songs from his musical in development, trunk songs, stand-alone songs, and a new version of "I Believe" from Altar Boyz . The 13 tracks were performed by Broadway performers including Cheyenne Jackson, Kelli O'Hara, Telly Leung, Michael Arden, Rachel York, Lisa Howard, Peter Friedman, Andy Karl, Anne L. Nathan, Kate Wetherhead, Kerry O'Malley, Natalie Venetia Belcon, Jim Stanek, Andy Mientus, and Noah Galvin. Walker co-produced the album with Yellow Sound Label co-founder Michael Croiter.
In 2014, Walker's next musical, Dog and Pony , with music and lyrics by Walker and book by Rick Elice, had its world premiere at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, starring Nicole Parker, Jon Patrick Walker, Heidi Blickenstaff, Beth Leavel, and Eric William Morris, with direction by Roger Rees.
As of early 2019, a new original musical being theo , with book, music and lyrics by Walker, was in development. [7]
| Year | Award | Category | Nominated work | Result |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 | Outer Critics Circle Award | Outstanding Off-Broadway Musical | Altar Boyz | Won |
| Drama Desk Award | Outstanding Music | Nominated | ||
| Outstanding Lyrics | Nominated | |||
| Lucille Lortel Award | Outstanding Musical | Nominated |
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 collaborations with 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.
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).
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 and Skydance Animation. 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.
William Alan Finn is an American composer and lyricist. He is best known for his musicals, which include Falsettos, for which he won the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Original Score and Best Book of a Musical, A New Brain (1998), and The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005).
Tick, Tick... Boom! is a musical by Jonathan Larson. It tells the story of an aspiring composer named Jon, who lives in New York City in 1990. Jon is worried he has made the wrong career choice to be part of the performing arts. The story is semi-autobiographical, as stated by Larson's father in the liner notes of the cast recording – Larson had been trying to establish himself in theater since the early 1980s.
Richard Adler was an American lyricist, writer, composer and producer of several Broadway shows.
Johnny and the Sprites is an American children's musical television show that aired every weekend on the "Playhouse Disney" block on Disney Channel. The show was created by, produced by, and starred John Tartaglia. The show's theme song was written by Stephen Schwartz. Each episode of the show features a musical number, many of which are written by various notable Broadway composers such as Gary Adler, Bobby Lopez, Laurence O'Keefe, Michael Patrick Walker, and others. The Sprites and all of the other creatures that inhabit Johnny's world were designed by Michael Schupbach. The set was designed by Laura Brock.
Altar Boyz is a musical comedy with music and lyrics by Gary Adler and Michael Patrick Walker and book by Kevin Del Aguila. Centering on a fictitious Christian boy band from Ohio, the show satirizes, among other things, the phenomenon of boy bands and the popularity of Christian-themed music in contemporary American culture. It began an Off Broadway run on March 1, 2005, and closed on January 10, 2010, after sixteen previews and 2,032 regular performances, making it the 9th longest-running Off-Broadway musical of all time.
Steven Sater is a Tony Award, Grammy Award, and Laurence Olivier Award-winning American poet, playwright, lyricist, television writer and screenwriter. He is best known for writing the book and lyrics for the Tony Award-winning 2006 Broadway musical Spring Awakening.
Marcy Heisler is a musical theater lyricist and performer. As a performer, she has performed at Carnegie Hall, Birdland, and numerous other venues throughout the United States and Canada. Heisler was nominated for the 2009 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Lyrics for Dear Edwina.
Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, known together as Pasek and Paul, are an American songwriting duo and composing team for musical theater, films and television. Their works include A Christmas Story, Dogfight, Edges, Dear Evan Hansen, and James and the Giant Peach. Their original songs have been featured on NBC's Smash and in the films La La Land, for which they won both the Golden Globe and Academy Award for Best Original Song for the song "City of Stars", and The Greatest Showman. Their work on the original musical Dear Evan Hansen has received widespread critical acclaim and earned them the 2017 Tony Award for Best Musical and Best Original Score. In 2022, they won the Tony Award for Best Musical for serving as producers for the Broadway production of Michael R. Jackson's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop.
Laurence Crawford "Larry" O'Keefe is an American composer and lyricist for Broadway musicals, film and television. He won the 2001 Lucille Lortel Award, Outstanding Musical as composer for Bat Boy: The Musical.
Justin Paul is an American theater and television composer and lyricist best known for his works The Greatest Showman, La La Land and Dear Evan Hansen, all of which he co-wrote with his songwriting partner, Benj Pasek.
Stafford Arima is a Canadian-born theatre director. Arima studied at York University in Toronto, where he was the recipient of the Dean's Prize for Excellence in Creative Work. He is a member of the SDC and CAEA. In April 2017, he became the artistic director of Theatre Calgary.
Gary Adler is an American composer and musical director based in New York. He received two 2005 Drama Desk nominations for his music and lyrics for the off-Broadway show Altar Boyz, which had its premiere in the New York Musical Theatre Festival the year before. As a composer, Adler has written songs for Disney Channel's Johnny and the Sprites and Dance Dance Revolution, which was presented by Les Freres Corbusier in December 2008. Mr. Adler is a graduate of the University of Michigan where he studied under William Bolcom
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Dave Malloy is an American composer, playwright, lyricist, and actor. He has written several theatrical works, often based on classic works of literature. They include Moby-Dick, an adaptation of Herman Melville's classic novel; Octet, a chamber choir musical about internet addiction; Preludes, a musical fantasia set in the mind of romantic composer Sergei Rachmaninoff; Ghost Quartet, a song cycle about love, death, and whiskey; and the Tony Award winning Natasha, Pierre & The Great Comet of 1812, an electropop opera based on War and Peace.
Michael R. Jackson is an American playwright, composer, and lyricist, best known for his musical A Strange Loop, which won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2022 Tony Award for Best Musical. He is originally from Detroit.
Adam Gwon is an American composer and lyricist living in New York City.
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