When Stephanie was four years old, her baby sitter placed paintings on the piano and asked her to play what she saw.  This empowered her to call herself a composer as early as she could read and write, and she has been passionately and prolifically creating things with music and words ever since.

Stephanie studied drama at Tisch/NYU where she also studied composition with Dr. Alan Cohen.  She participated in Adam Guettel's group lab class through Musical Theatre Works, and she was selected as the youngest member of the New Dramatists' Guild's  Composer/Librettist Studio in 2006.

Her music theater works include: HOTEL SARAJEVO (Hot Ink Festival 2004), TULLY (IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER) (New York Musical Theater Festival 2007, for which she was awarded for Excellence in Music), THANKSGIVING!  A!  PAGEANT!  (AdNauseum Lyceum) and THE APOSTLE PROJECT (Theater Mitu/NYTW).

Songs of Stephanie's have been performed at Café Vivaldi and Don't Tell Mama, and she contributed material for DREAMAKERS (with Brian D'Arcy James) at the Children's Aid Society. She recently spent a year in Prague collaborating with the Czech gypsy/folk band Tripura.

Some exciting projects which are currently in development: a music theater piece inspired by James Agee's "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" (with playwright Molly Rice and director Rachel Chavkin), "A Musical Fantasia On Piratical Themes" (in collaboration with Joshua William Gelb), a song cycle about the end of the world, and an opera for the extraordinary songstress Heather Christian.
www.stephaniejohnstone.com

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They Ran and Ran and Ran
by Jerome Ellis and James Monaco

Jerome Ellis and James Monaco tell stories using live music and a lot of words.  In They Ran and Ran and Ran, a Musician and a Wordsician come together to create a tale of fantastical suburban life.  Involved are a ten-year-old falconer who runs away to the circus, a young girl who lives alone in the woods, a man facing his mortality at Thanksgiving dinner, and a tribe of creepy kindergartners.  It's a fast, tangential, twisted musical evening, brought to you by two friends with a heart for upright pianos and The Arabian Nights.

Motherlodge and 7^th Ave South present
FUTURITY: A Musical by The Lisps
Thursday, April 15^th @ 7 pm | Friday, April 16^th @ 7 pm & 11 pm | Saturday, April 17th @ 2 pm
Tickets $15

Book by Molly Rice and César Alvarez
Directed by Meghan Finn

FUTURITY, an original sci-fi Civil War musical by Brooklyn band The Lisps, tells the story of Julian Munro, a young Union Soldier in the Civil War who is an aspiring inventor and science fiction visionary. Together with his brilliant mentor, the famous metaphysician Ada Lovelace, Julian concocts an epic fantasy that folds a Utopian, high-tech future into the dark and violent reality of war.

The Lisps
Sammy Tunis – Ada Lovelace, vocals
César Alvarez – Julian Munro, vocals/guitar
Eric Farber - percussion/ found objects

Ensemble
Michael Cerveris*
Chelsey Donn
Maya Ferrara
Grant O'Brien
Aaron Schroeder
Ben Simon
Caroline Tamas
Jillian Tully
Lorenzo Wolff

* appearing courtesy of Actors' Equity Association

 

Production Design by Emily Orling
Costume Design by Normandy Sherwood
Lighting Design by Paul Toben
Production Stage Manager Jennifer Caster

Produced by The Lisps with Christopher Maring and Toby Ring Thelin

www.FuturityTheMusical.com  

www.TheLisps.com

www.Motherlodge.com

 

 

 

Balthrop, AL

In 2006, Alabama-born songwriter-siblings Pascal and Lauren Balthrop moved to New York City to start a band and ended up founding a town. Balthrop, Alabama, population 11 or so, is their bustling folk rock township.

Musically, the band straddles the fine line between antebellum and antifolk, reconstructing indie pop with songs of love, dead people, and dead people in love. One fan described the town's genre as "barnyard epic indie rock." In 2007, they released their double-album debut, Your Big Plans and Our Little Town, on the nascent End Up label, followed by a series of EPs: the rebellious God Loves My Country and the companion records Subway Songs and Cowboy Songs.

Louisville's LUCKY PINEAPPLE with special guest Penny Arcade
Saturday, April 17th, 11 PM

Lucky Pineapple is comprised of an unlikely combination of classically trained musicians, veterans of the Louisville punk scene, theatre performers, improvisational noise artists and all around unique individuals. From their earliest days, since inception in 2004, they have tried to play out of the ordinary shows including art gallery parking lots, Zombie Proms, film festivals, house parties, a student lounge at Transylvania University, as a musical interlude during a teen talent show at the Louisville Free Public Library, frequent appearances on WFPK's Live Lunch series, cross-dressing events, Louisville Slugger Field (home of the Louisville Bats AAA baseball team), warehouse music festivals, and world renowned theaters (such as Actors Theater Louisville). Their live shows have included light shows, video projection collaborations, matching tuxedos, inflatable palm trees, magicians, costumed superheroes, a go-go dancer, their own dance troupe, a bubble truck, and a semi-regular group of back-up singers.

The band self-released their debut album The New Rainbow in 2006 and were featured on a Noise Pollution split seven inch with fellow Louisvillians VRKTM that same year. In 2005, recording engineer and Lucky Pineapple friend Mike Bridavsky was at a Tape-Op convention and found himself winning a poker game for which the prize was a free day of recording at Steve Albini's Electrical Audio in Chicago. He donated this prize to Lucky Pineapple; the band accepted and chipped in for a second day of recording. The five songs that came from this session provided the foundation for The Bubble Has Burst in Sky City. They later filled the album out with additional material recorded at their home studio. The album was mastered by Carl Saff in Chicago and was released in September of 2008 on Noise Pollution. Several months later, that album caught the ears of sonaBLAST, who agreed to back it for a national rerelease in August of 2009. Concurrent with the rerelease, the band partnered with local filmmaker Andrew Vititoe to produce their first music video for "Moment in an Empty Street." The video debuted at the Louisville Film Society's Short Film Showcase, and subsequently was made available online and on cable channel Fuse On Demand. Lucky Pineapple will be making their debut performance at the South By Southwest Music Festival in March, 2010. The band is currently performing in support of The Bubble Has Burst in Sky City.