The Maltz Jupiter Theatre highlights its “We Create Art” season campaign with the Emerging Artist Series in Musical Theater Playwriting. Funding for this new program was granted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, from the Community Foundation of Palm Beach and Martin Counties, and the Roy A. Hunt Foundation. Launching the new series will be Academy, which will be performed on Thursday, October 30, 2008 at 6:30pm. This special “insider’s event” will allow audiences to witness a critical step in the writer’s process; “the reading” presented on stage.
Academy tells the story of a prestigious prep school, where two senior boys make a bet involving an unsuspecting naïve freshman. But when they Faustian bargain goes too far, they realize their lives will never be the same again. With a 40-piece youth orchestra under the direction of Palm Beach Music Center and a mass choir under the direction of Young Singers of the Palm Beaches, Academy is a hymn to the journey every boy must traverse from childhood to manhood. Academy’s book, music and lyrics are written by John Mercurio. With degrees from the Eastman School of Music and NYU, Mercurio was a member of the BMI Advanced Musical Theatre Workshop. As a recipient of awards from both the Jonathan Larson and the Gilman & Gonzalez-Falla Musical Theater Foundation for his work in musical theatre, Mercurio also had his musical, Myth, developed at the Eugene O’Neil National Music Theater Conference and received the Georgia Holof Award for lyric writing.Videos