Coming Out

Coming Out, the Musical

Coming Out, the Musical follows several college students as they experience their spark moments, and the questions and confusions that follow as they explore these new feelings and "come out of the closet," so to speak. Some are welcomed with acceptance as they start to share these discoveries with their friends and families, and others are met with resistance and ignorance. And while their journeys never end, each character finds that their path is clearer than it has ever been before.

Development

I began writing Coming Out, the Musical while attending The National Music Theater Institute in the fall of 2018. We were presented with a prompt to choose a group that’s underrepresented in musical theatre and write the first five pages of a musical script, with an opening song. The group that I chose was young members of the LGBTQIA+ community. I was so inspired by the assignment that I chose to expand the piece for my submission for Playwright’s and Librettist’s week. It was selected and was presented as a 25-minute staged reading to my peers and a panel of responders. After returning to New York, I expanded the piece to a 60-minute one act musical, and it was presented as a staged reading in 2019, and again virtually in 2020. After reviewing the feedback from those readings, I expanded Coming Out into a full-length musical, selections of which were featured in a director’s workshop series in 2022. I received the New York State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant in 2022 to produce a staged reading of the first full length draft with Emerging Artist Theatre. I collected feedback from this reading and developed a second full-length draft, which I then workshopped in a living room reading and edited based on the feedback I received. 'Coming Out, the Musical' is now in its third full-length draft.