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Keen Company is in the third year of workshopping and developing a new musical by Adam Gwon (Ordinary Days, Scotland, PA). The commission is to create an intimate musical which is small in scale but large in emotional impact. We believe the musical theater canon needs more musicals that connect!

You can help bring this new commission to life! Thanks to a generous donor, all donations will be matched up to $20,000.

“Those who want to spot talented up-and-comers will want to check out Adam Gwon.” — Los Angeles Times

In January 2022, Keen Company began the three year commission of a new intimate musical with book, music, and lyrics by Adam Gwon, marking the first full-length musical commission in our company’s history! Keen and Gwon last collaborated on the first New York revival of Ordinary Days which was nominated for the 2019 Drama League Award for Outstanding Revival of a Musical.

Photo of Adam Gwon

Adam Gwon is a musical theater writer named one of "50 to Watch" by The Dramatist magazine and hailed "a promising newcomer to our talent-hungry musical theater" whose songs are “funny, urbane, with a sweetness that doesn’t cloy” by The New York Times. His musicals have been produced on six continents, in more than half a dozen languages.

Off-Broadway: Scotland, PA (Roundabout Theatre, Drama Desk Award nomination, New York Times Critic’s Pick), Ordinary Days (Roundabout Theatre; Keen Company, Drama League Award nomination - Best Revival), Old Jews Telling Jokes (Westside Theatre, New York Times Critic’s Pick); Regional: Witnesses (California Center for the Arts, Craig Noel Award, Outstanding New Musical), String (Village Theatre), Cake Off (Signature Theatre, Helen Hayes Award nomination; Bucks County Playhouse), Cloudlands (South Coast Repertory), The Boy Detective Fails (Signature Theatre), Bernice Bobs Her Hair (Lyric Theatre of Oklahoma); West End: Ordinary Days (Trafalgar Studios). Other projects include “The Waves in Quarantine” (a film collaboration with Lisa Peterson and Raúl Esparza), songs as a staff writer on the hit webseries “Submissions Only,” and for Stephen Schwartz and John Tartaglia’s The Secret Silk on Princess Cruise Lines. Adam is the proud recipient of the Kleban Award, the Fred Ebb Award, the Richard Rodgers Award, the Frederick Loewe Award, the Second Stage Theatre Donna Perret Rosen Award, the Weston Playhouse New Musical Award, the ASCAP Harold Adamson Award, and the MAC John Wallowitch Award, as well as commissions from Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Signature Theatre, South Coast Repertory, the Kimmel Center, and Broadway Across America. His songs have been heard at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, and more, performed by such luminaries as Audra McDonald, Kelli O’Hara, and Brian d'Arcy James. Recordings of Adam's work include the cast album of Ordinary Days (Ghostlight Records), Audra McDonald's "Go Back Home" (Nonesuch), "Artists in Residence" (Broadway Records), "The Essential Liz Callaway" (Working Girl Records), Tracy Lynn Olivera's "Because," and "Over the Moon: The Broadway Lullaby Project" (Entertainment One). Adam has been a fellow at MacDowell, Hermitage Artist Retreat, the O'Neill Music Theater Conference, and the Dramatists Guild, is a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, and is a member of ASCAP and the Dramatists Guild. He served on the Tony Awards Nominating Committee from 2015-2018, and currently sits on the Dramatists Guild Council and the Boards at Roundabout Theatre Company and Primary Stages. (Headshot Photo by Nina Goodheart Photography.)

Thanks to the Commission Collective

This new musical is being developed through special support from the Keen Company Commission Collective. The Commission Collective is a troupe of supporters who believe in the importance of original musicals and setting artists up for success with all of the resources needed to continue to develop and workshop new material.

A special thank you to Sylvia Golden, Sally and Robert Huxley, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Shen Family Foundation Musical Theater Composers Initiative, and Charlie and Jessica Whitehead for being the first to join the Commission Collective.

Love new work? Explore our Playwrights Lab and Keen Teens.