Photo by Craig Schwart

As part of this year’s IN-Festival, McCarter is producing a concert reading of Sleeping Beauty Wakes, the musical that Groovelily band members Brendan Milburn and Valerie Vigoda are writing with playwright Rachel Sheinkin (who wrote the book for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee). A reading of a musical is a lot more complicated than a reading of a play. For a play, we typically cast it and then assemble everyone for a rehearsal the day of the reading. For a musical, we’ve got to teach all the music, so there will be several days of rehearsal for this one reading.

Sleeping Beauty Wakes was co-produced last year by Deaf West Theater and Center Theatre Group, and was performed in its world premiere in both spoken English and American Sign Language. The concert reading at McCarter will feature only the spoken (and sung) English, as Milburn, Vigoda and Sheinkin use this opportunity to continue working on the story before they reincorporate the ASL. You can click here to listen to a medley of songs from Sleeping Beauty Wakes.

You can reserve your free tickets to the reading on March 8 here. And, as always, you can watch a GrooveLily video below.

Posted by Adam Immerwahr, Producing Associate at McCarter Theatre. Photo: Russell Harvard and Alexandria Wailes in Sleeping Beauty Wakes at Center Theatre Group.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 8:30 am and is filed under IN-Festival 2008, In the Lab. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.