MUSICAL THEATre
SOMEDAY
Music by Christopher Curtis
Lyrics by Marjorie Duffield
In-process.
Set against the backdrop of a defining American moment – the building of the first Transcontinental Railroad – Someday is at heart a love story. WeiLi (a Chinese girl disguised as a boy to work on the railroad) and Kieran (a young Irish boy on the crew) meet and fall in love against every odd. Throughout the course of the show, these young lovers must endure racial misunderstanding, bad luck, bad timing, and a course of events that will try to tear them apart. As the railroad is built, we journey with them through the persistence of love and the miracle of human connection.
PRESENTING OLIVIA JAMESON
Book & lyrics by Marjorie Duffield
Music by Robert Waldman
Based on the story “Last Acts” from The New Yorker by Georgia Shreve.
In-process.
Star of the Broadway stage and international cabaret scene, Olivia Jameson has a highly successful career to maintain and a reputation to uphold. She also has a problem -- the bloom is starting to fade and she knows it. Forced to leave a successful gig and return home to tend her ailing and contentious mother, Olivia encounters the rural landscape and country ways she left behind so many years before. She also encounters herself.
TIT TALES
Book & lyrics by Marjorie Duffield
Music by Greg Pliska
Songs featured in the internationally televised Reproductive Freedom Festival, 2016.
Premiered at WOW Café Theatre, New York, NY, Fall 1996; Williams College, January 1999.
A comic body-politics cabaret that follows the adventures of three characters as they deal with being female, and more specifically, having breasts.
SIT-IN AT THE FIVE & DIME
Words by Marjorie Duffield
Music by Janice Lowe
Story by Marjorie Duffield and Janice Lowe
In development.
Workshops/readings: The Music Theatre Company, Chicago, IL, August 2013; Case Western Reserve, Cleveland, OH, September 2011; New Harmony Project, New Harmony, IN, May 2008.
Sit-In At The Five & Dime is a musical set in Nashville in 1959. The piece follows the lives of three university students who are training in non-violent direct action in order to stage a sit-in. Their ultimate ambition is to desegregate all of Nashville. The story focuses on Will, Joelle and Mark in this coming-of-age journey. Set against the backdrop of the Jim Crow South and the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement, Sit-In explores our characters’ fears, attractions, interpersonal struggles and triumph.
LUCKY HANS
Book & lyrics by Marjorie Duffield
Music by Danny Ashkenasi
Premiered at the Blue Heron Arts Centre in Manhattan and BRIC Studio in Brooklyn, NY, March 2002; The Calhoun School, New York, NY, Spring 2004.
Based on the Brother's Grimm fairytale "Hans in Luck," and set in Brooklyn, this family musical follows Hans through a series of wacky encounters and comic business deals as he sets out for home to see his mother.
CYBER-ALICE
Book & lyrics by Marjorie Duffield
Music by Sunmee Cho
Staged reading as part of the Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab, New York, NY, July 2002.
Set in the futuristic nightclub of the oracle-like Alice – this cyber-opera explores memory, forgetting, love, and loss.
IN A LAKE OF FIRE
Book & lyrics by Marjorie Duffield
Music by Greg Pliska
Directed by Jean-Bernard Bucky
Premiered at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, April 2000.
Winner of the Moss Hart Award, New England Theatre Conference (Fall 2000).
Finalist for the Richard Rodgers Awards (Spring 2001).
In A Lake of Fire is a music-theatre/media piece that thematically explores perception, racist accusation, the nature of desperation, lying and the need to tell the truth. Borrowing from Medea and the 1994 Susan Smith case, In A Lake of Fire also examines how community acts in the face of tragedy and how it moves beyond it.
TOMBSTONE A.T.
Book & lyrics by Marjorie Duffield
Music by Kyeongjae Lee
Reading at the NYU Tisch School of the Arts Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program, May 2001.