DAVID MALLAMUD (Music)

David Mallamud has composed for venues ranging from Carnegie Hall to Off-Broadway, where his music for the recent production of Flight School: The Musical was lauded by Laurel Graeber of the New York Times as the show’s “biggest boon . . . variously embracing classical lyricism, pulsing pop, the poignant ballad and at least one all-out, Alice Cooper–style rock rant.”

Recently Mallamud was thrilled to work with Mike Mills (of R.E.M. fame), arranging and composing additional music for his Concerto for Rock Band and Violin (Toronto Symphony). It toured the US and is about to embark on second tour in which Chuck Leavell of the Rolling Stones will join the band.

Other projects include: Dr. Seuss’s The Sneetches The Musical with playwright Philip Dawkins, (Children’s Theatre Company, Minneapolis); Flight School, The Musical which has had several off-broadway runs, two US tours, and is currently touring China; and Kid Frankenstein, which ran Off-Broadway and has an upcoming production at The Millbrook Playhouse; he is currently developing projects with Nathan Christensen, Fred Sauter, and Trav S.D.

An active classical composer, his music has been performed by many classical ensembles including: The Albany Symphony, The New World Symphony, The Harrisburg Symphony, and The Westchester Philharmonic.

His acclaimed CD, The Wild & Whimsical Worlds of David Mallamud (Broadway Records), won a Broadway World Album Award for Best New Compilation. It earned praise from Amy Biancolli (Albany’s Times Union), “The sum is an album of music conceived for imaginary stages in imaginary worlds, but rendered like old hands, with all the relaxed brio of a Broadway cast album. Whether aching or upbeat, whether evoking Disney or Bernstein or Tin Pan Alley or "Tommy," the music is delightful. It's also insane. There's a nuttiness to the whole thing, a kind of crazed enthusiasm....”

He has been a MacDowell Fellow, a Dramatist Guild Fellow, A Leonard Bernstein Fellow (Tanglewood), recieved two ASCAP Morton Gould Awards, and a Charles Ives Scholarship from The American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He holds degrees from Juilliard, Eastman, and Tisch, and has pursued additional graduate studies at Yale.

NATHAN CHRISTENSEN (Book, Lyrics)

Nathan Christensen is a playwright and bookwriter/lyricist. He earned an MFA in musical theatre writing from New York University, and his musical theatre work has been honored with a Richard Rodgers Award, a Jonathan Larson Award, a Daryl Roth Award, a Dramatists Guild Fellowship, and an O’Neill Theater Center residency.

His musical adaptation of Lois Lowry’s novel The Giver, written with composer Scott Murphy, was featured at the NAMT Festival of New Musicals, as has been seen in musical theatre festivals across the country. Their musical Broadcast, a panoramic history of radio, has been performed at Playwrights Horizons in New York City, University of Nebraska at Lincoln, University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Wesleyan University in Connecticut.

His play The Battle Creek Cure was performed as part of the Tallgrass Theater Festival. He is currently writing a holiday play titled The Winter Visitors, and collaborating with composer David Mallamud on a steampunk adaptation of a Jules Verne novel.

Nathan has also been a concert violinist, tutored Kazakhstani jewelers in entrepreneurship, produced a live comedy review show, served as a missionary in South Korea, conducted experiments in sonoluminescence, written greeting cards, co-founded an exotic fruit-growing business, composed a women’s jazz quartet that is performed around the world, and was a theater critic in Tucson, Arizona. He and his wife co-authored Keeping Kyrie, a memoir about the experience of adopting six children, one of whom was born with a life-threatening birth defect called Pierre Robin Sequence.