2023-2024 Marvin Hamlisch International Music Awards
Nominees, MUSICAL THEATRE Composition (Emerging Division)
Josh Cleveland, Washington, District of Columbia, United States
I am a Washington, DC-area educator, songwriter, music director, and pianist, and have just completed my first year as a composer participant in the BMI Lehman Engel musical theatre songwriting workshop. I also participated in the inaugural Composer-Librettist Studio convened by the Alliance for New Music-Theatre in Washington, DC in June 2022. Recent/current music direction credits include Elegies (Keegan Theatre), True North (a new work) at Catholic University, Annie (Little Theatre of Alexandria), and Pippin (Catholic University). I serve as the collaborative pianist for the Young Artists of America’s middle school ensemble and the resident music director for La Ti Do DC (which produces musical theatre/spoken word cabarets). My song “Maple Trees” was recognized and studio-recorded by the DC-area songwriting collective Emergent Seed in August 2020.
john Coyne, Brooklyn, New York, United States
John Coyne is a composer and lyricist for musical theatre. Recent: a cabaret of comedy songs called Center of The Universe (Chelsea Table + Stage), and a TYA piece written for Musical Theatre West that toured LA. He is currently working on an adaptation of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. He has written other TYA with Rachel Lampert (Kitchen Theatre Company). He often improvises scores for clown, commedia dell'arte, and other physical theatre. He works as an accompanist, teaching artist, and music director throughout NYC. During the pandemic, he arranged and music supervised two EPs with Ben Crawford (Phantom of the Opera). John produces and curates Up Next, a variety show for adventurous musical theatre, presented by the Off-Broadway company BEDLAM, where he is a Company Member. He aims to help carve out space for strange musical theatre to thrive. BFA: Pace (Acting).
Veronica Leahy and Andrew Van Camp, New York, New York, United States
Veronica Leahy is a composer, multi-woodwindist, pianist, and music director across a range of genres. She recently graduated from Harvard summa cum laude with a B.A. in Music and a secondary in Theater, Dance and Media. Her senior thesis American Tonic, an original song cycle exploring invisible disability, was awarded high honors. Recently, she composed and music directed Queen of Magic, which had its first production in the Loeb Ex theater in December 2022. Veronica got involved in theater through composing for the First-Year Musical, Fake Moos. She has gone on to compose for Harvard’s iconic Hasty Pudding Theatricals, scoring two of their musicals. In 2021, she served as the music assistant for MacBeth in Stride at the American Repertory Theater, and she music directed for two Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert & Sullivan Players productions. Veronica also founded the Harvard Student Composer’s Festival, bringing together student and world-renowned composers alike to share original pieces. As a saxophonist, Veronica has appeared with artists such as Jon Batiste, Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and Terri Lyne Carrington. She participated in Berklee’s Jazz and Gender Justice institute and served as the lead alto player in Berklee’s premiere big band. She has performed at venues such as Lincoln Center, Birdland, Dizzy’s Club, and 54 Below, and recently appeared on the GRAMMY Award-winning jazz album New Standards, Vol. 1. Veronica was awarded the Radcliffe Doris Cohen Levi Prize, which recognizes one Harvard student per year for achievement in musical theater.
Andrew Van Camp is a playwright, book writer, lyricist, and sound designer. He will graduate from Harvard in December 2023 with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics and a minor in Theater, Dance, and Media. Recently, he wrote, produced, and sound designed Queen of Magic, which had its first production in the Loeb Experimental Theater in December 2022. Andrew was first recognized for his lyrics when he was awarded 11 points of extra credit on a high school pre-calculus exam for writing a parody of “Let It Go” about the quadratic formula. He wrote the lyrics for his first full length musical, Fake Moos, in his first year of college. Andrew and Veronica’s songs have been featured at the Harvard Composer’s Festival and won the Berklee Curtain Up competition and were performed with full orchestration at the Berklee Performance Center. Andrew studied playwriting with Sam Marks at Harvard, and his play Negative Results had a professionally directed reading at the Harvard Playwrights Festival in April 2022. He was also the first student to be hired by the historic Hasty Pudding Theatricals as a professional sound designer and an audio technician at the American Repertory Theater for their recent productions of The Wife of Willesden and Evita. Andrew acted throughout high school and college and studied acting and voice with Remo Airaldi and Erika Bailey. When not writing musicals or sound designing, Andrew can sometimes be found in labs researching how bacteria evolve, for which he won the Goldwater Scholarship.
Asher Muldoon, New York, New York, United States
Asher Muldoon is an actor, composer, and comedian based in New York. He recently graduated Princeton University with a degree in English. His first musical, an adaptation of Patrick McCabe's "The Butcher Boy" premiered in New York in Summer 2022 at the Irish Repertory Theater. He recently made his international debut at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival with his one-man musical ghost story "Mine." As an actor, he's performed in many professional productions and was a member of the original touring cast of "Dear Evan Hansen."
Alexander Unikowski, Canberra, Australia
Alexander is an award-winning music director, composer, conductor, educator and multi-instrumentalist. Holding a degree in composition and a diploma in Piano Performance, Alexander has studied at the Australian National University and McGill University in Montréal, Canada; under world-renowned conductors in Sydney and Melbourne; and most recently as a part of NYU's music directing intensive. Alexander's music directing work has been extensive and varied, with highlights including an award for Best Musical Direction for 'And The World Goes Round' in 2019, and a Recognition of Excellence for Music Direction of Mamma Mia! in 2021, both in Canberra. Alexander has composed for a range of ensembles and settings, including multiple theatre productions, and in 2013 for the Australian Youth Orchestra.