Playwrights Horizons Gets Major Mellon Booty

Just received this press release. Does anyone remember five, six, seven years ago when American Theatre magazine did a big story on Playwrights Horizons that tried to paint it as edgy, rising, experimental and all sorts of similar buzz words? That was just silly. That said, this is genuinely excellent news for one of New York's most essential and cherished nonprofit theatres.

PLAYWRIGHTS HORIZONS

AWARDED $2 MILLION GRANT FROM THE ANDREW W. MELLON FOUNDATION TO HELP CREATE A CONSORTIUM WITH OTHER THEATERS ACROSS THE COUNTRY TO PRODUCE NEW WORKS OF MUSICAL THEATER

GRANT IS THE LARGEST PROGRAM GRANT IN THE THEATER COMPANY’S HISTORY

Playwrights Horizons (Tim Sanford, Artistic Director; Leslie Marcus, Managing Director) has announced that the theater company has been awarded a $2 million grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The $2 million grant for Playwrights Horizons is the largest program grant in the theater company’s history. The grant will help create a fund that will allow the institution to develop new works of musical theater, each in partnership with a Regional theater – wholly within the non-profit system from start to finish. Spread over seven years, the program aims to commission at least four new works of musical theater and develop and produce three or four full-scale productions. Each of the three musicals will be produced at both one specific Regional partner and at Playwrights Horizons.

This new program will continue Playwrights Horizons’ long-standing commitment to developing unique and ground-breaking new musicals such as Grey Gardens, James Joyce’s The Dead, Floyd Collins, Assassins, Sunday in the Park with George and the Falsettos trilogy.

“This is the 30th Anniversary of Playwrights Horizons’ musical theater program. It was the first program of its kind in the United States, and we have been at the forefront of developing new musicals since then. This grant is an enormous step toward making sure that new musicals – regardless of their commercial potential – can continue to be developed and produced across the country,” said Artistic Director Tim Sanford. “While producing musicals in partnerships with commercial producers has been fruitful for many institutions, the Mellon Foundation grant will allow us to create partnerships with like-minded institutions across the country without having to rely on support from the commercial world.”

“A grant of this magnitude and duration will play an invaluable role in Playwrights Horizons’ ongoing commitment to musical theater,” said Managing Director Leslie Marcus. “It will enable us to build a new national model for developing musical theater projects. We are confident that it will also be a catalyst for securing additional funding from other major institutional and individual donors who support musical theater and who will embrace the notion of a national network of theaters committed to the musical theater form. We are deeply grateful to the Mellon Foundation for this visionary grant.”

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