About

Based in North Hollywood, California, the Academy for New Musical Theatre creates, produces and studies new musicals.  The complete mission statement of the Academy for New Musical Theatre is “to foster the highest quality of musical theatre writing, and to advance the state of new musical theatre production”.  ANMT’s writers’ workshop offers a sequential program of involvement, ranging from workshop sessions that feature a curriculum in writing for the theater, to brokering new collaborations between authors and musicians, to producing their works for public audiences.

The Academy for New Musical Theatre’s roots go back 30 years to the teachings of Lehman Engel, the preeminent Broadway musical director.  John Sparks assumed Artistic Directorship of the workshop in 1981 and has been leading this prestigious arts community ever since.  

ANMT hosted salons with Jason Robert Brown, Winnie Holzman, Jeff Marx, Marty Panzer, Stiles & Drew and Stephen Sondheim. In 2007, ANMT launched a Concert Reading Series at the Colony Theatre in Burbank, California, and that series has expanded each subsequent season.  In the past six years the Academy has developed over 200 musicals, working with such producers as The Colony Theatre, Deaf West Theatre, Latino Theatre Company, Broadway Rose Theatre, Copake Theatre, Celebration Theatre, Deaf West, Red Mountain Theatre, American Folklore Theatre, Civic Light Opera South Bay Cities, McCoy Rigby Entertainment, East West Players, Carousel Theatre, the Lyric Theatre, the Victory Theatre, University of California Irvine’s Department of Drama.

The Academy has produced two musicals under their own banner:  A Ring in Brooklyn, written by Eric Dodson and Alan Ross Fleishman, which played at the NoHo Arts Center from July 28 through September 2, 2012; and 40 is the New 15, written by Larry Todd Johnson and Cindy O'Connor, which played at the NoHo Arts Center from July 16 through August 22, 2010.  In 2012, the Academy's summer programming included workshop productions of Manson's Girls, Windjammers, Mary Marie, The Angel of Painted Post, Wanting Miss Julie,  two concert reading series, and three national conferences on the business of the musical theatre business.  

ANMT writers have developed musicals Imelda; Aging Out, e-$cape: a cybermusical; Ghost(s); In the Mind of Olympians, Miss Vulcan 1939, Now and Then a Hero, Powder Puff Pilots, Sour Grapes (or the Ladies of the Hood River Horticultural Society and the Flower that Nearly Destroyed Them), Tinseltown Christmas, and Twice-Told Tales.  They are currently developing Duplexity; The Max Factor Factor; People of Silence and Sound; L.A. Carmen; the digital natives project; Coffins of the Mayflower; Bloodline; Child of Ages; and Vlad.