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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
November 17, 2006

Contact: Contact: Mike Emery
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STAGE STARS SET TO SHINE DURING MUSICAL THEATRE LAB PERFORMANCE AT UH

Broadway legend Stuart Ostrow has spent the fall semester grooming the next generation of stage stars. Now, he’s ready to watch them shine in front of live audiences.

Students in Ostrow’s Musical Theatre Lab at the University of Houston will present excerpts from three new musicals at 8 p.m. Dec. 1 – 2 in UH’s Jose Quintero Lab Theatre. Performances are free and open to the public.

Selections will include scenes and songs from musical adaptations of Marcel Ayme’s “The Walker Through the Walls,” Mark Twain’s “The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg” and John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt.”

Offered through UH’s School of Theatre & Dance, the Musical Theatre Lab is composed of student composers, lyricists, book writers, directors, producers, choreographers and designers, who were all hand-picked by Tony award winner and UH Distinguished University Professor of Theater Ostrow.

Students were split up into three teams and given the challenge of composing musicals based on works of literature.

“The greatest questions a musical dramatist must answer are: Does the story I am telling sing? Is the subject sufficiently off the ground to compel the heightened emotion of bursting into song? Will a song add a deeper understanding of character or situation?,” Ostrow said.

Ostrow founded the Musical Theatre Lab in 1973 at St. Clement’s Church in New York City. It was later developed at the Kennedy Center and Harvard College before it arrived at UH in 1995. During its stay in New York, the lab hosted workshops featuring the talents of Arthur Miller, Carol King and Robert Wilson.

Ostrow received Tony awards for “1776” as Best Musical in 1969 and “M. Butterfly” as Best Play in 1988. He has also produced Tony nominees “Pippin” and “The Apple Tree,” in which he collaborated with regular UH Children’s Theatre Festival contributor Jerry Bock, Bob Fosse, Stephen Schwartz and Sheldon Harnick .

WHAT:    Stuart Ostrow’s Musical Theatre Lab

WHEN:    8 p.m., Friday, Dec. 1 – Saturday, Dec. 2

WHERE:  Jose Quintero Lab Theatre in the Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at UH

WHO:     University of Houston School of Theatre & Dance

For more information about UH visit the university’s ‘Newsroom’ at www.uh.edu/admin/media/newsroom.