Rites of Passage Closes at Prospect Theater Company at the West End Theatre

The songwriting team of Michael Cooper and Hyeyoung Kim have written a short musical that will be presented as part of an evening called "Rites of Passage" at the Prospect Theater Company at the West End Theatre, at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew, through February 20. Cooper and Kim won an award for Best Musical for a Boston production of their musical SUNFISH earlier in the season. The composer/lyricist team is seen as one of the most important rising songwriters, having won the prestigious Jonathan Larson Award and Daryl Roth Award a few years ago. The West End Theater is at 263 West 86th Street on the Upper West Side.

Tickets are $18, and can be purchased at www.ovationtix.com.

The Prospect Theater Company brings together writing teams to produce an evening of short musicals. The evening is closely watched, as a way of spotting new material ripe for development. Other writing teams taking part in the evening are Sam Carner and Derek Gregor; Cheryl L. Davis and Cody Owen Stine; J. Sebastian Fabel, Timothy Huang, Laura Kleinbaum and Max Mamon; and Janine Nabers and Sharon Kenny.

The cast for the short musicals will include Starr Busby, Ryan Dietz, David Foley Jr., Kathryn Holtkamp, Hansel Tan, Anita Vasan and Daniel Yates.

The evening is a developmental performance of new musical shorts by some of NYC's most exciting emerging musical theater writers, the result of work created in the company's 5th annual musical theater lab. The seven participating writing teams were selected through a competitive, open application process. In December, each team was randomly assigned a topic on which to create a brief musical. These pieces were workshopped during January and will be presented in a single evening. At once deeply personal and profoundly universal, Rites of Passage explores the ceremonies of everyday life that become iconic of our human experience.